


A Face Built For Gettin' Punched

by bomberqueen17



Series: Choice Is Not A Word A Bullet Knows [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: American History, Artificial Intelligence, Brooklyn, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky's Arm, Cybernetics, Cyborg Identity, Drug Withdrawal, F/F, Gaelic Language, Hydra (Marvel), Irish Language, Irish Mob, Loss of Control, Loss of Identity, M/M, Marvel Universe, Multi, New York City, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-OT3, Pre-OT4, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Social Media, Virtual Reality, marvel 616 elements, novel-length, uh whoops this is definitely explicit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-02-13 13:19:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 189,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2152248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the follow-up to The Night Has Seen Your Mind.<br/>I just wanted to write some Stucky h/c but this, well, I'm not saying there's none of that, I'm just saying that's not really what this is. Never could do things the easy way.<br/>This is Bucky in from the cold, fresh off a triumphant escape from HYDRA, but stuck now with the aftermath. His arm is busted, he has 75 years of cumulative damage to deal with, HYDRA's vengeance includes releasing the files on his missions to the world and whipping up sentiment against him, he still has implanted conditioning to reckon with, and he's a YouTube sensation.<br/>Steve has to handle his confusing career status, the unfinished business he and Bucky left behind decades ago, and the whole idea of having personal feelings and, like, relationships and things.<br/>Natasha is still coming to terms with life as not-a-spy, and her own implanted conditioning.<br/>Sam Wilson is perfect in every way but sometimes exasperated. His job is not easy. His personal life is even less easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue / Go Dte Tu Un Cead

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 1: Prologue / Go Dte Tu Un Cead
> 
> In which we revisit a few scenes from earlier eras before launching in directly to the scene we left in the final chapter of the [prequel to this story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1725374). 
> 
> I have a ton of research notes, which I am going to attempt to distill into an end note.
> 
> ****

_* * *_

_Prologue_

_Washington D.C., 2013_

 

He had endured cold before, had endured hunger and pain, and wasn’t particularly worried about his capacity to handle them. The damage he’d sustained was significant but not critical; his right arm was more or less useless, but had slipped back into the socket on its own in all the fighting, and his fingers tingled but he could move them. It would heal. The left arm had taken some damage and needed maintenance; it made grinding noises, didn’t move fluidly, and some of the plates were immobilized. It _wouldn’t_ heal. But he didn’t go in, didn’t go back to be debriefed and repaired and put back to sleep.

It was a long time since he had made deliberate choices. 

This wasn’t entirely a deliberate choice. His handlers were gone in the chaos. But he didn’t even go to the rendezvous point that had been set, or any of the alternates. And he deliberately waited, though the cold became brutal, until after dark before he moved away from the culvert where he’d been sheltering and went into an inhabited area to find materials to become inconspicuous. 

Sweatshirt, hat, jeans, socks, money. 

He had been wiped too recently, and too imperfectly, and he knew he wasn’t operating at anything like full, or even reasonable, capacity. Everything felt far away and like it was happening to someone else, and he knew he wasn’t presenting anything like a normal affect. People thought he was odd, crazy, unstable, but it meant they avoided him, and that was fine. 

The pain was bad, that first day, and the night that followed— his right arm was agony, and his head. He stayed out of sight as much as he could, though he had to make one foray to buy food when the pain in his stomach started outcompeting the pain in his head. His left arm didn’t freeze up entirely, and remained usable, but it hurt, it made noise, it was unpleasant. On top of that was the withdrawal— he knew they had drugged him consistently, he knew he had suffered before when he had gone too long between doses, and so he knew he could get through the shaking and nausea and convulsive pain. He knew it would pass, it just didn’t make it pleasant to bear.

But he began to try, through the pain in his head, to think. 

Thinking was hard. Thinking was bad. Thinking wasn’t something he’d really been allowed to do for a long time. But he’d known, now, for a while— maybe always— that they were lying to him, that they were hiding things from him, that they weren’t trustworthy. He’d pretty much always known, he just hadn’t had the capacity to care.

They had told him he was a hero, had told him he was a great weapon, had told him he was the tool by which history was shaped, the instrument that cleared the way for peace. He’d believed it, somewhat, but he had never really… been all that concerned with it. He was just a guy doing a job, and whether it was an important job or not wasn’t something he worried about. It wasn’t like he had time to think about it. 

For a long time he’d thought he was a robot. But he wasn’t. He’d figured that out a long time ago, and it had been a gradual process but he had slowly, through the reprogramming and the wipes and the weight of oblivion, formed the coherent, concrete thought: he was not a robot. He bled, he sneezed, he had stomachaches and occasionally had to take a shit and was often hungry, and his nails and his hair grew and had to be cut, and his flesh parts sometimes failed and sometimes changed shape and sometimes were exhausted and couldn’t be forced onward. Often he bled, sometimes his bones broke.

He knew he was human. He knew he was a weapon. 

Now he knew he’d been someone, before. And he knew, now, everything they’d said, all of it, had been lies. 

He wasn’t stupid, was the thing. He knew he had always been smarter than they’d accounted for. All along, he’d known they weren’t telling him everything. He’d just always sort of assumed that, deep down, somewhere under all of it, it made sense in some way. Somewhere in there, doubt had crept in, and he’d started to feel that there was some hollowness at the core of all of it, something that they were fighting against, something they struggled to keep concealed from him. The more brutal conditioning, the more violent mind-wipes, all seemed to be bent on hiding something or breaking something. Even fragmented as his awareness was, it kept coming back to coalesce around that central point of something, something they were hiding from him. 

And then he saw the man on the bridge, and _knew_ him. And— 

That was it. He’d been a person, once, a regular person who loved and was loved, who wanted and was wanted, who had dreams and goals and was allowed to feel. 

That was what they’d been hiding from him, what had been behind the otherwise-inexplicable, emphatic savagery of their programming of him.

And that was gone, but now that he knew it had been there they couldn’t take that awareness away again. He was ruined for their purposes, in exactly the way they’d feared for so long.

He had been confused and conflicted about it, and angry, so angry. He’d fought the man, the man with the shield, had fought hard against him because this was his entire understanding of the world that was falling apart. But when the man had surrendered, it had made it clear that the anger was misdirected. 

So he had pulled the man out of the water, had made sure he was alive. He was still angry with him, but the anger was slowly transitioning itself over to the people who had taken this away from him, who had hollowed him out and filled him with their— with their nothing, their chaos, their violence, their greed, their arrogance. None of it was his, he wanted none of it, they had no right to put any of it into him. 

And he walked away.

And he disappeared. 

He had no good way of accounting for days, except for the need to eat. He had to eat several times in a day, and he could not go without for long. He hid for days, stealing money and stealing food and keeping himself alive, and as he stayed alive, as he went longer without having been wiped, it hurt worse and worse and worse, but he remembered. He got more and more back. The withdrawal shakes eased, he could keep food down longer now though he kept the trick of eating only a little at a time just in case— he still didn’t know how to even go about trying to sleep, still was wracked with uncontrollable muscle tremors, but they were easing, slowly, less intense and less frequent.

His name was— James— he’d gone by other names. _Bucky_ , the man had called him, and he remembered that, his mind knew the shape of that, he remembered being that, he knew it was true. He was Bucky. He was— James. He was a— he was— Barnes, his last name was Barnes, his mother had been a Murphy, his cousins were all Murphys, he knew he— 

Steve, was the man, Steve— a kaleidoscope of things he knew about Steve, the way Steve was, but they were confusing and his head hurt so badly, so so badly— he bit his tongue and his nose was bleeding and pain, it hurt, so bad—

 

He came to himself slowly, groggy. It was the first time he’d— had he slept? He wasn’t sure. It had been days, it had been dark seven or eight times and he’d needed to eat at least a dozen times, and there had never really been sleep. He had strained a bunch of his muscles, in his back, in his neck, in his legs— and bitten his tongue, and his nose had bled and his head still hurt. But he could think now, sluggishly, and he recognized that he’d felt like this before— he’d had a seizure of some kind. 

He needed maintenance. 

He’d damaged his left arm further in his convulsions, and now the locked-up plates were impeding his freedom of motion. He managed to sit up shakily, and had to lean over to throw up— nothing, there was nothing to throw up, he’d been out for hours and what little he’d had in his stomach, he’d digested. 

He needed maintenance. 

It took him another two or three days and nights, sleepless again, shakes getting worse, to find what he was looking for. He stole a vehicle, reluctantly; he had to cover more ground than he could manage on foot in his weakened state, and so the increased profile such a large crime required was the price of that. With the vehicle his range was extended enough that he could more effectively forage for food, and adequate calories made his thoughts a little clearer, let him form a coherent plan. He had to commit another crime, risking unwanted attention again to break into a computer lab so he could access the Internet— he barely understood the technology but what he knew, what had been put into him for missions, was adequate, combined with what he had observed, to get him into a secured network where he could look for the information he needed.

He remembered some of these techs. He matched the names with the ID photos and hit on a particular one— a woman, he’d never known her name but he knew her face; she hadn’t bothered with false kindness but she had been reasonable, had been smart, had spoken to the others like she knew what she was doing, he remembered her. And she didn’t live far away. He memorized her name and address and went after her. Regina Wells.

And she was unwary enough that he got her. Alive and undamaged. He brought her to the facility, guarded now by only a skeleton crew, and managed to despatch the guards without raising any alarm. 

She was conscious when he pulled the hood off her head. She recognized him immediately, and terror blanked her face; he pulled the duct tape off her mouth and she made no sound, dumb with fear. 

“I need maintenance,” he said, and his voice barely worked. 

“They said you were dead,” she finally managed to say. 

“They were incorrect,” he said. “I need maintenance.”

“Why didn’t you report to your handlers?” she asked, and she was shaking now, pale. 

“My mission is not compete,” he said. “I need maintenance.”

“Your mission failed,” she said.

“My mission is not complete,” he said, and he must have used more emphasis, because some emotion flickered across her face and her tone changed.

“Your mission failed, soldier,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault. All of us failed.”

He set his jaw, breathing hard. “I need maintenance,” he said. 

“Your handlers—“ she began. 

“They failed,” he said, cutting her off. “I will not return to them. They failed. I will complete my mission.” 

He knew better than to tell her that he wasn’t talking about the mission she thought he was. Of course that mission had failed. He had abandoned it, the only time he had ever abandoned a mission. He had a new mission, or was acquiring one as he came to understand it, and it was a mission pulled out of the fragments in his head. He had no memory of ever having done that before, but somewhere in the shards left where they’d hollowed him out were enough fragments that he knew he had. He could assign himself a mission. He knew everything he needed to know to do it. And it had a good chance of success because they didn’t know he had it in him. 

They had no idea what he had in him.

“I don’t have the training to perform the maintenance you need,” she said, and gestured toward the chair. “I don’t know how to operate the machine.”

“I do not need that,” he said, managing to control his shudder. “That is for when I am given a new mission. I do not need a new mission. I require equipment maintenance.” 

“I don’t have the training to do much,” she said. 

“You fix the arm,” he said. “I know you do, I looked you up, Regina Wells.”

She looked at his arm, hidden under a bulky jacket. “I can only do basic repairs,” she said. 

“If you lie to me or hurt me,” he said quietly, calmly, “I will kill you. I do not answer to anyone anymore and there is no one here to stop me.”

That made her tremble again, and she looked up into his face and her expression was… maybe defiant? “You’ll kill me anyway,” she said. 

He shook his head. “Not if you fix me,” he said. 

“What if it’s not possible?” she asked. 

He shook his head. “I won’t kill you if you do your best,” he said. 

“But I’ve seen you,” she said. “I could turn you in.”

“I’m not worried,” he said. “If they were going to catch me they would have.”

“They didn’t know you were alive,” she said. “They didn’t know to look for you. Listen, soldier, you need to come in properly, you need to let them fix you all the way. They can repair your programming. You must be in pain.”

He stared at her, then stood up and unzippered the coat, took it off, took off the sweatshirt underneath. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt under that, and under that a sleeveless shirt, but he left both on. “I will not,” he said. “I require no programming.”

“I can’t fix you,” she said. 

“I will kill you if you refuse, Regina Wells,” he said, but his heart sank. He hadn’t counted on her being stubborn. He’d chosen her because he had remembered her being reasonable. There were other techs he could find, though they’d be forewarned by her disappearance— but he was about to the end of his capabilities, and he probably didn’t have it in him to successfully capture another tech. Not with his right arm injured and his left malfunctioning.

“You’ll kill me anyway,” she said again, and he could recognize that expression— that was despair. Oh, he knew that one all right.

He shook his head. “I promise,” he said, “I won’t.”

“You don’t know what a promise is,” she said. “That was never in your programming.” She was a little scornful.

He stalked over to her and grabbed her chin in his right hand, which had enough of its strength back that he could use it, at least. He squeezed the jawbone until she stared into his eyes. “I am more than my programming,” he said. “I assure you, I know what a promise is.”

She looked really frightened, then. “How do you know that?” she asked, very quietly. 

“Because I was a man of my word, once,” he said, letting go of her face. “I knew what a promise was, and I kept the promises I made. I had friends and a family and a job. I had a name. I had a mother. You people tried to take all of that away from me, but you failed.”

She looked flatly astonished. “You were— you’re a cyborg,” she said. “You were never a person.”

“My name was James,” he hissed. 

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “you—“ 

“My name,” he said, “was _James_. I had sisters. I was a sergeant in the Army. I had friends.” It was hard to say those things. He set his jaw and swallowed them back down. Sisters. He’d had three sisters. He knew that. He _knew_ that.

“Oh my God,” she murmured. “Oh my— oh my God.” She looked sick. “Listen— I don’t— I don’t know where you got that idea. But you’re not human. You never were. You’re almost entirely synthetic. Your biological components were all salvage.”

Maybe she really believed that. His anger ebbed into weariness, and he pulled out a knife, flipped it end over end, and walked around behind her. She made a squeaking noise. 

“If you gotta believe that to get by,” he said, “you do that, but I know who I am.” He used the knife to cut the tape around her wrists. “I don’t care. Fix my arm. Whether you believe me or not, _I_ do, and so I know what a promise is and I won’t kill you if you do me right.”

He stood up and walked away while she pulled her arms around in front of herself and rubbed her hands together, staring at him. “I,” she said, “it’s not a question of belief, it’s just truth.”

“I found my service records,” he said quietly. “The fingerprints match. I found photographs. The features match. I always knew there was something in there, and when the man on the bridge recognized me I figured out what it was— and I knew him, I wasn’t just saying that to get myself tortured some more.” He flipped the knife around and slid it back into the sheath, watching her as she gingerly climbed to her feet. “I don’t care what you believe, I just want you to fix my arm.”

She stood unsteadily, turning to look at him, wariness in every line of her body. “You’re a Russian-made cyborg,” she said. “They used biological components but you were never a person. There was no consciousness in the remains they used, no identity.”

He tilted his head at the tool cabinet in the corner. Power hadn’t been cut to the place, so the scanners and everything were working. He wasn’t arguing with her, it wasn’t something he particularly cared to do. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Get to work, and I won’t kill you.”

She let out her breath sharply, and went over to the tool cabinet, pulling a few things out. He stood and watched her, making sure all of the tools looked familiar and weren’t obviously weapons instead. She booted up the monitor on the scanner, and he walked over and yanked the network cable out of the wall. He knew which one it was, it was a completely different type than the power cable. He’d been trained on that at some point, it was in the jumble of things he knew. He also knew there were wireless data connections but if a computer had the wire it was unlikely to also have wireless capability. She started to make a protesting noise, but stopped, tilting her head as if conceding the point. 

She pointed to the chair and he shook his head. He wasn’t getting anywhere near that thing. He hooked his toe through the rungs of one of the stools the technicians had always used instead, and pulled it over with his foot. 

“If you do kill me, though,” she said, as he sat down, “you’re screwed.” She pulled the scanner into position, giving him a shrewd look.

“Not really,” he said. “There are half a dozen more of you that I know of, who know well enough how to make this thing work.”

“You’d never get back into this facility,” she said. 

“That hardly matters,” he said. “There are others.” He really was bluffing— but not for the reasons she thought.He didn’t have the strength or endurance to do it, was all.

“You wouldn’t know about them,” she said. 

He watched her pull the scanner across his arm. “Every wipe is only as good as the last one,” he said. “I know a lot of things you all think I don’t remember.” 

She jerked her head up, at that, and looked at him in some alarm. “That can’t be true,” she said.

“One of the two of us is working on _very_ incomplete information,” he said, and his face felt odd— smiling? He might have been smiling. 

 

He let her live. She fixed his arm to the best of her ability, and seemed genuine enough about it. He spotted a blip on the scan that could only be a tracker, and pointed wordlessly to it; she removed it for him without protest. She asked him a few teasing questions about this person he supposedly was, and he answered her; she was trying to catch him in a contradiction, but she never did. 

After she closed the arm back up, explaining that he needed spare parts she couldn’t get and a new power source she wasn’t able to replace, she sat for a long moment staring at him. 

“They told me you had never been a person,” she said. “I really— I really thought you were just a robot.”

He shook his head. “I was a prisoner of war,” he said. “I was tortured and experimented on. I didn’t want this.”

“I thought I knew what kind of organization I worked for,” she said. “It was one that did what was necessary, yes, but I didn’t… I didn’t know you were a person, that we’d done these things to. Or if you were, I assumed you’d have volunteered.”

“Does it make you feel better or worse?” he asked, reaching for his t-shirt. He was shivering; he’d had to strip down to the sleeveless shirt and it was cold in here. 

“Worse,” she said. “Of course. My god.”

“Well,” he said. He pulled the shirt on; she made no sudden moves while his face was hidden, so he reached for the sweatshirt next. “I guess you have a choice, then.” He knew about choices. Remembering what choices were was what had started this whole mess he was committed to now.

“If you don’t kill me,” she said.

“I told you,” he said patiently, and fastened the sweatshirt, then pulled on his jacket. “I told you I know what a promise is.”

“You’re foolish to let me live, though,” she said. “Because I know far too much, and if you kill me they won’t find out.”

“That’s your choice,” he said. “I’m not much concerned. They’ll know I’m alive when I complete my mission anyway.”

She stared at him as he stood up, and pushed herself to her feet as well. “You’re not talking about the last mission they sent you on,” she said. 

“No,” he said, and smiled. “You’re smarter than the others, Regina Wells. I know you’ll choose to do the right thing.” He wasn’t sure how he knew that. He knew a lot of things he didn’t know how he knew. But this one, he was pretty confident in. The attention her dead body would attract if discovered outweighed what little benefit there was in the certainty that she wouldn’t talk. So whether she betrayed him or not, it didn’t matter; his choice was made.

 

* * * 

 

_New York 1939_

 

“Dia’s Muire dhuit,” Bucky answered politely, holding the door as Mrs. Ferguson went through it. He caught Steve’s look, and wondered which thing he was going to hear about later. Everything was always on Steve’s face, right out front, but sometimes the transparency made it more difficult to figure out what he was actually thinking. 

“Ta se fuar,” Mrs. Ferguson commented.

“Ta, ta se an-fhuar,” Bucky agreed, grimacing— it _was_ cold, she wasn’t wrong. “Ach, ta se tirim,” he offered, looking on the bright side. _At least it’s dry._

“Ta,” she conceded, “ta se tirim, buiochas le Dia.”

“Buiochas le Dia,” Bucky echoed. _Thank God_. He waved, and pulled the door shut behind her, rummaging in his pocket for his own key. 

“I don’t think I got more than two words of what you’ve said all day,” Steve said; he had his key out already.

Bucky shrugged. “I’ve heard you talk Irish before,” he said. 

“I know four phrases, Buck,” Steve said. “Good morning, I’m well thanks, yes please, the devil with you.”

“Just talkin’ about the weather,” Bucky said. He shrugged again. He knew fine well Steve couldn’t understand much Irish, which was why he used it for some of the business he did. 

“With your cousins?” Steve asked skeptically, unlocking the apartment door. 

“Ah,” Bucky said, “they was just passin’ on gossip. If it was anything important I’d’ve switched to English. I figured you understood enough of what you was interested in.”

“They looked awfully intent,” Steve said mildly, hanging up his jacket with some care. “And since when does Jack Murphy gossip?”

“Jack Murphy is the _worst_ gossip,” Bucky said, and it was a lie; his youngest uncle Jack Murphy had been an IRA soldier in the War of Independence, and legend had swelled his achievements over there to slaughtering whole regiments of Black and Tans, to say nothing of his activities on this side of the Atlantic. He rarely smiled, generally did not speak unless it was necessary, and mostly followed his father like a grim shadow; absolutely none of his legend could be attributed to anything like boasting. 

Steve gave him a look, and Bucky burst out laughing; it had been a ridiculous thing to say. Of course Jack Murphy didn’t gossip. Cousin Tommy had pulled Bucky aside while he was walking home with Steve after work, and Jack had solemnly informed him that he needed the cousins to come by Patrick’s house that night about a business matter. Bucky’s cousin John O’Reilly, son of Jack’s sister Kathleen, had been there too, with a grim look that suggested he knew more about what was going on than Bucky did. Bucky hadn’t asked. It wasn’t his place to ask. And it certainly wasn’t his place to tell Steve anything about it.

Steve knew very little about the Murphys’ business concerns. The patriarch, Patrick Murphy, owned a metalworking shop where almost everyone in the family worked, including Steve. But Patrick was also involved with the local branches of the currently-reigning neighborhood gang; everyone who was anyone was. And they had a long-standing, simmering rivalry with an Italian family with business concerns in nearly-overlapping territories and who had a protection racket to boot. Bucky usually managed to keep Steve from finding out about Bucky’s occasional involvement as muscle in the enforcement of various territorial concerns, but it was tricky. 

Steve was an interloper, an outsider, in the Murphys’ extended clan, but he was accepted, because of what Sarah Rogers had done for Bucky’s little sister Kitty, who had been sickly like Steve. Pneumonia had taken her and spared Steve, one awful winter, but not for lack of effort on Sarah’s part— Kitty would have died the previous winter without her intervention. Consequently, Steve was family, though that didn’t mean he was allowed to know much about the business. Bucky was the one who had to ensure it stayed that way.

“Any of that corned beef left?” Bucky asked.

“Some,” Steve said. “Plenty of cabbage, but it’s gone a bit soggy.”

“How’s about I fry it up into hash with the last of the potatoes?” Bucky asked. “I think we got some butter, right?”

“We do,” Steve said, “a little.”

“Then I’ll do that,” Bucky said. He mentally tallied the contents of his wallet. “I think I got enough, I can pick up some butter and more potatoes on the way home tomorrow, and I know we need bread.”

“That’d be nice,” Steve said noncommittally. “But you know I have Thursday mornings free, I’m going to the shops then anyway.” 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “but I think it’s my turn to buy.” Bucky earned three times what Steve did and had fewer expenses, and so Bucky paid the rent (the rationale being he was renting the place anyway, he just wanted Steve there to keep him company), but Steve had put his foot down and they split food expenses 50/50 despite the fact that Bucky ate a lot more than Steve did. Bucky tried to make up for it by always being the one to buy the stuff they ran out of between shopping trips, but like most of his noble intentions he usually didn’t manage to do it. “You got any homework?”

“What are you, my mom?” But Steve obediently produced his books, and set them on the corner of the table. 

“I might as well be,” Bucky said. “I promised her I’d care for you, didn’t I now?”

Steve sighed. “Awful silly thing to do,” he said, and was distracted, and let Bucky ask him about the assignment and talk it out with him while making dinner. 

But Steve wasn’t a fool, not at all. Bucky tidied up after dinner, put the dishes away, and said, “Well, I’ll be back in a bit, it should be brief,” and Steve gave him a calculating look. 

“Is this what you were talking about in Irish with the Murphy boys?”

Bucky took his coat down from the hook, and looked at Steve for a moment, feigning blankness. “Yeah,” he said. “Oh— you weren’t followin’?”

“Bucky,” Steve said, exasperated. “You _know_ I don’t speak Irish.”

Bucky sighed, and shrugged. “You think you’d’ve picked it up by now,” he said, half-smiling. “Spendin’ all this time with all us Micks.”

“You didn’t used to speak it so much,” Steve said, a little coldly. He was touchy about that word. He was Irish too, but the wrong kind of Irish, was the thing— his family were Anglican, or had been, when there’d been anybody. Bucky figured really Steve was getting the worst of both worlds, since everybody hated Micks but nobody hated Protestant Irish more than the rest of the Irish. Steve had sidestepped most of it by his mother being a saint and himself not being far behind, but it didn’t mean nobody ever got shit for it. Mostly Bucky, though, and he was fine shouldering that particular issue. “Only since Tommy comes around so much, it seems to happen more.”

Bucky shrugged again. “Guess he likes it,” he said. “I’ll teach you some more words. It’s just more of Grandpa’s talking, now that he’s getting old, he keeps wanting the cousins to come by all the time. It shouldn’t be long.”

“Patrick Murphy isn’t getting old,” Steve said, not inaccurately; Bucky’s grandfather was one of those sturdy indeterminate men who could have been forty, could have been seventy, and wasn’t putting up with your shit either way. “Patrick Murphy was born the age he is now and will always be this age.”

“Does seem it,” Bucky said. “He insists, though.” He grinned blithely. “Maybe he’ll leave more of his fortune to me when he goes.” 

“Yeah, with all your Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Conor’s kids, you’d surely be the one he’d favor,” Steve said. “To say nothin’ of Jack’s.”

“And why not?” Bucky asked, adjusting his hat. “I’m the prettiest.” He pursed his lips slightly and cocked his head.

Steve barked out a genuine laugh at that. “That you are, Buck,” he said. “Take care of that pretty face tonight. If you’re back before ten I’ll probably still have the light on.”

“I’ll try to be,” Bucky said, with a theatrical eyeroll. “You know how the old man talks.” He pulled his gloves on and went out. 

 

Bucky was the baby, as far as the Murphy Boys were concerned. He was the youngest adult male cousin by almost five years, and he’d only come back to them at twelve, having been raised up to that point among his father’s people out west. So they all treated him like a cross between an idiot and a coddled favorite, which got old. Like he hadn’t lived in the city long enough now to know how it worked. 

Didn’t mean he didn’t know how to bust some heads. Didn’t mean he never got into it. 

But it did mean that, that night, when it went sour, when they got into it, when one of the dagoes pulled a knife and went for Bucky with it— connected with Bucky with it— well, Jack Murphy heard the noise Bucky made, and saw the blood, and he went for the guy and he didn’t stop hitting him until Bucky realized he was going to kill the guy and managed to get up and pull him off. 

“Jack, no,” he said, his arm wrapped across his bleeding ribs, “no, Jack, it’s— no—“

The guy definitely wasn’t in any condition to fight back and Seamus, John O’Reilly’s little brother, helped Bucky pull Jack off him. “That’s enough,” Seamus said, “Jack, enough, shit— shit, that’s too far, Jack,” and they broke off and retreated.

“I thought he killed you, Bucky,” Jack said raggedly, grabbing Bucky by the back of the neck, “I thought he killed you.”

“Shouldn’t’ve pulled a knife, to be sure,” Seamus said, “but we’re in trouble if he’s dead,” and they fell back and regrouped with the others. At Patrick’s house, there was a second cousin by marriage who was a nurse, and he cleaned and stitched the unpleasant gash just under Bucky’s ribs on the left side, pronouncing it a near miss. 

“I don’t like it,” Patrick said, “it’s a messy business,” but it was all beyond Bucky’s understanding, he just went where he was told. He kissed Bucky on the forehead and told him he was a good boy, and sent Seamus with him to walk him home. 

“You sure you’re all right, now,” Seamus said, as they came up on Bucky’s street. 

“It’s fine,” Bucky said, though it hurt a lot. It had cut some of the muscle, and it was going to be a long time before it healed all the way, but at least it hadn’t punctured his gut. That would have killed him slowly. “I hope Jack didn’t kill the guy.”

“Yeah,” Seamus said, “that’d be a rare disaster. Don’t think the cops wouldn’t notice that.” The police tended not to care much if there were fights, as long as there weren’t bodies left over afterward. “But, no help for it now.”

“I gotta think of something to tell Steve,” Bucky said. At least he’d changed out his shirt for a new one that wasn’t sliced and bloody. He’d taken a shot to the face that would bruise, though, and the knuckles of his left hand were a little swollen. 

Seamus laughed. “It’s like he’s your wife,” he said. Bucky was the only unmarried one of them. Seamus was twenty-eight and had a son and a daughter already.

“Steve’s nobody’s girl,” Bucky said, a little defensive. 

“You’re awful tight with him, though,” Seamus said. 

Bucky gave him a look. “How else am I supposed to be?” he asked. 

“Aw, I don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Seamus said. “I know why you couldn’t stay with your Da in that house. And it ain’t right for a man to live on his own. You’re just lucky you got such a good friend.”

“He is, Seamus,” Bucky said. 

“Oh, I know it,” Seamus said. “And he’s a good fellow, anyone can see that. But you know he’s angel-touched, he’s not long for this world, the poor thing.”

“I don’t know about that,” Bucky said. “He’s got a lot more life in him than you’d think for someone that little.” Seamus tilted his head, at that, conceding the point, and they walked in silence for a moment.

“Just say we were dancin’ and it got rowdy,” Seamus said. “You hit a stair-rail or something.”

“I suppose,” Bucky said. Lying wasn’t so hard, but somehow it was about five times harder than it should be when it was Steve you were lying to. “Maybe he’ll be in bed.” It was ten-fifteen. 

“You’ll be even sorer tomorrow,” Seamus said, with a wisdom born of experience. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said glumly. He knew how it went. He’d never been knifed, but he’d taken his fair share of damage in fights here and there. Mostly at Steve’s instigation, actually.

The kitchen light was still on. Shit. Well. “Thanks for walkin’ me home, Seamus,” Bucky said. 

“If you’re feelin’ poorly tomorrow,” Seamus said, “you know Grandda won’t dock you if you stay home. But let someone know, and he’ll get Rory to come out and have another look at you.”

“I’m fine,” Bucky said, and embraced Seamus good-night at the building door. 

He fixed his hair a little bit, and steeled himself before unlocking the apartment door and letting himself in. He pulled his coat off so Steve wouldn’t see that it was hard for him to raise that arm, and came into the room.

Steve was sitting at the kitchen table, nodding off over a book. He snapped awake and sat up. “Oh, hey, Buck, what time is it?”

“Close to ten-thirty,” Bucky said. “You didn’t finish your homework yet?”

“Oh,” Steve said, and shut the book. “I did, I was just readin’ ahead.”

“You weren’t waitin’ up for me,” Bucky said, hanging up his hat. Maybe Steve wouldn’t notice, maybe his face wasn’t that bad yet. It was mostly numb, just starting to swell; the color wouldn’t come up for a couple of days.

“Naw,” Steve said, grinning, “why would I do that?” Bucky pushed at his hair and stepped further into the room, keeping the bruised side of his face away from the light. 

“Seamus asked after you,” Bucky said, sitting in the armchair to unlace his shoes. Oh wow, he was stiff. He’d gotten punched a couple times, he was going to be pretty miserable tomorrow, but if he took a day off Steve was definitely going to ask uncomfortable questions. 

“How’s he doin’?” Steve asked, packing his books up. “And Jenny and the kids?”

“I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him,” Bucky said, “but he looked well.”

“He’s nice,” Steve said. He went over to the washbasin and got his toothbrush. 

“All my people are nice,” Bucky said a little sourly. Jack had pretty much killed a man for him, did that count? He couldn’t tell that to Steve, but he badly wished he could, because he didn’t know what to make of it otherwise. The man hadn’t been much older than Bucky, just an Italian kid protecting his own family, and maybe he’d been wrong to pull a knife but it wasn’t like Bucky didn’t have a knife on him too. He did, he just knew better than to pull it where anyone could see. His was plausibly just a pocket-knife, at least. And if he’d practiced and practiced with it, flipping it and handling it and learning how to drive it into imaginary targets at different angles, well, that was just a boy’s fancy. He’d never kill anybody. 

Except if Patrick needed him to, because he’d have to, and if anyone killed or badly hurt Jack or Seamus or Tommy or John or Danny or God forbid Steve of course he would, and… well, maybe Bucky was barely out of boyhood but he definitely knew that all the fine intentions in the world were pretty worthless in the face of the real world. 

He put his shoes neatly together next to the chair and pushed as smoothly as he could manage to his feet. “Your family _is_ pretty nice,” Steve conceded, spitting out his toothpaste. 

 _If you’re on their good side,_ but Bucky didn’t say that. 

Steve did look angel-touched, Bucky reflected, coming up behind him to get his own toothbrush. The light glinted off Steve’s hair like in old paintings of angels, and his wide blue eyes in his narrow almost feminine face gave him such a sweet look. 

Bucky knew fine well that Steve was anything but sweet most of the time, except he really was, he really was that good. Steve would never kill anybody, Steve would always know when to stop. Even when his blood was up in a fight, he’d never take it too far. Even if he were strong enough to kill somebody, or if he had a knife or a gun, he’d never kill anybody. He’d never lose sight of what was right in the shifting uncomfortable confusing runaround of real life. He’d always know what to do. 

And if he did die young, Steve was definitely one person who’d go straight to Heaven. Bucky had no illusions about the state of his own eternal soul. He toed the line well, he did what he was supposed to, but he had a sneaking feeling that the road of the righteous didn’t have quite so many detours for well-intentioned compromises as he was prone to taking. 

Steve washed his face and got out of Bucky’s way so Bucky could rinse and spit, then take his own turn washing his face. Bucky checked his bruised face in the mirror gingerly when he thought Steve had gone on to the bedroom, but when he turned Steve was watching him speculatively from the middle of the room. 

He didn’t say anything, and Steve didn’t say anything, so they both went into the bedroom, and Bucky shut off the light in the main room and changed in the dark. 

“You okay, Bucky?” Steve asked in the dark, once they were each in their beds. It wasn’t cold enough yet for them to push them together, ostensibly for Steve’s benefit but really for Bucky’s. Bucky was always too cold, Steve always ran hot unless he was sick— and the first symptom that Steve was really getting sick instead of just feeling poorly like he normally did was if he wasn’t radiating heat. That was Bucky’s signal to make Steve stay home and pile himself up with hot water bottles and drink all the hot tea he could stand. 

It was only autumn yet, though, not time yet. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “I’m okay.” 

“You let me know if you’re not,” Steve said, and Bucky felt like a heel, worrying so much that Steve would nag him like an old lady. That wasn’t Steve’s way at all, and Bucky should’ve known that. _Did_ know that. It was a sign of a guilty conscience that he had worried so much— and what did that say, that he felt guilty for discharging family obligations? 

“Course I will,” Bucky said. 

 

He was too sore the next morning to pretend he wasn’t. He dressed quickly so Steve wouldn’t see the stitches and the bruises, but he couldn’t hide it when he moved. And his face had bloomed up into an obvious bruise, still a dull red but clearly swollen all along the cheekbone. 

“I guess I ain’t gonna ask,” Steve said, eyeing him over the breakfast table. 

“You know I’d tell you if I thought I could,” Bucky said tiredly, pushing his egg around his plate. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew he had to eat. 

Steve shook his head. “Sure,” he said, “but I don’t get why you can’t.”

“Family business,” Bucky said. He glanced up, catching Steve’s baffled look. “I know you’re family, you are, Steve. But there’s family family, and then there’s business, and I can’t talk about business.” 

Steve shook his head slightly, a line appearing between his eyebrows. “Okay, Buck,” he said. “If you say so.” 

Bucky looked back down at his egg, completely failing to come up with any words that made any kind of sense in the face of the thing lodged in his throat that was the way he felt about Steven Rogers. It was a strange, dumbfounding kind of thing, like getting hit in the face with a frying pan and like getting off, all in one. How it was possible to know somebody so well you could pretty much tell whether they’d love or hate any given thing you encountered, and yet be continually astonished by their reactions to things, Bucky didn’t know. But he knew he generally saw the world through a filter of wondering what Steve would make of it, most of the time, and that was probably weird but it was the only way he knew how to live.

He’d figured out by noon that he really shouldn’t have gone into work today. It hurt to move, it hurt a lot to move, and while this wasn’t the most physically demanding job in the world, it wasn’t exactly a desk job. He was collecting himself to get up and get back to work after lunch when his father sat down across from him. 

“Jimmy,” Jim Barnes said. 

“Hey Pop,” Bucky said. 

“You look like somebody beat you up,” Jim said. 

 _Yeah, somebody besides you_ , Bucky thought but did not say. He shrugged instead. “I’ve had better mornings,” he said, “but I had worse too, so I ain’t complainin’.”

“My only son,” Jim said. “My only son and he’s a goddamn thug.”

Bucky shoved to his feet, a little too fast. “Well, at least I ain’t a drunk,” he hissed viciously, and stalked back toward the shop. 

Jim stood up sharply, and suddenly Jack Murphy was standing directly next to him, expressionless, silent. Jim blinked uneasily at Jack, looked over at Bucky, and looked back to Jack. 

“Bucky,” Jack said quietly, stepping away from Jim to follow him. “You look sore.”

“I’m pretty sore,” Bucky agreed. Jim looked furious. That was the thing; he was happy to use his fists on someone who was smaller than him, like his wife, or on someone who wouldn’t fight back, like Bucky, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d never even so much as consider taking a swing at someone like Jack, who wouldn’t hesitate to put him on the ground or maybe even under it. The only reason Jack hadn’t already, he’d made quietly plain, was that it would hurt Bucky’s mother, Jack’s sister. 

“Go home, get some rest,” Jack said. 

“I’m all right,” Bucky said. 

“You’re only saying that because you’re nineteen years old and have no goddamn sense,” Jack said. 

“I’m twenty-two, Jack,” Bucky said, affronted. 

Jack shrugged. He was in his early forties. His wife Nora was as terrifying as he was, in a different way, and his two sons and three daughters were all highly enamored of Bucky and insisted he play with them whenever he was around. Bucky’s relatively isolated position age-wise meant spent a lot of time at family gatherings liberally bedecked with children in general, but especially Jack’s kids. Bucky was old enough to be an adult, to them, but young enough to be accessible, and it meant he was the most fascinating person they knew. Steve was more of a mascot to them, but Bucky was their idol. 

“My point stands,” Jack said. 

“There’s only four hours of work left,” Bucky said.

“My point,” Jack said. “We got it. Go on.”

Steve came by in the afternoons, that was when he did most of his part-time clerical work. He’d notice right away if Bucky wasn’t there. But he’d also notice if Bucky was there and not behaving normally. “I don’t _like_ missin’ work,” Bucky said peevishly, knowing he was beat. He couldn’t operate the sheet metal cutter like this, it hurt too much. He’d been trying all morning and it hurt like hell. 

“I don’t like seein’ you like that,” Jack said. “Go on home. I’ll make your excuses.” 

Bucky chewed his lip. “If you say so,” he said. 

“I say so,” Jack answered, and that was that. 

 

“Bucky?” It took him a long time to claw his way up to being awake, and he blinked gritty eyes, too hot and awfully sore and really disoriented. “Bucky?”

“Steve,” Bucky said, orienting himself. He managed to find a hand at the end of one of his arms, and rubbed his face with it, uncoordinated. “Hey. Timeizzit?” It was almost dark, but given the season that didn’t mean a whole lot. 

“I just got home from work,” Steve said. “Jack said you weren’t feeling well and went home. Are you sick?”

“No,” Bucky said, understanding the question— if he was sick, Steve would have to avoid him to keep from getting sick himself. “No— Steve, no, it’s— I’m just, I’m real sore.” He was really sore, worse than before, a hot sharp ache that tugged at the stitches in his side. 

“What happened?” Steve asked. “Your dad—“ He bit it off. 

“Didn’t do it, this time,” Bucky said. He felt hot, which was either a bad sign or a sign that he’d piled himself with too many blankets before he fell asleep. He pushed himself up gingerly, and shoved his sweaty hair out of his face. Steve was standing in the bedroom doorway, looking worried in that broody way he had. 

“No,” Steve said. “He just… he said to me, he said he was surprised I didn’t have a problem, an upstanding citizen like me, with sharing a room with a notorious gangster.”

Bucky rolled his eyes exaggeratedly for Steve’s benefit. “Christ Almighty,” he said.“I don’t think he could be any more of a hypocrite about any of it. He’s just jealous I’ve started getting beat up by other people now.”

Steve came in and sat on the edge of the bed, mouth tugging down with unhappiness. “Who did beat you up?” he asked, and his fingers were cool and dry as he traced along the edge of the bruise on Bucky’s face. 

“Ahh, some wop didn’t like my face,” Bucky said dismissively.

Steve’s eyes were in shadow in the dusky room, no lights on yet and the light from the window failing, but it was still easy to see his expression. His mouth tugged to one side. “Funny how many people find your face objectionable,” he said. 

“I guess that’s not new,” Bucky said with a laugh. 

“People besides your dad have always beaten you up,” Steve said, and he moved his fingers to push Bucky’s hair back. Bucky closed his eyes, enjoying the coolness of his fingers and the gentleness of his hand. A lot of people touched Bucky, he had a life of easy physicality, but he liked Steve best. He wasn’t a baby to Steve, wasn’t a means to an end or a symbol of anything, wasn’t a thing to use or control at all. Even the girls he went with sometimes, they touched him because they wanted him to do things with them. But to Steve, he was just himself, and it was unusual enough that he treasured it. 

“Even you sometimes,” Bucky said, and it was true, Steve had taken a swing at him a time or two. He’d never hit him back, would never hit him, but he didn’t mind if Steve hit him. Usually, he’d pissed Steve off and deserved it. He’d scuffled with him plenty, he’d just never thrown a punch. 

“You got a face built for gettin’ punched,” Steve said, putting a hand either side of Bucky’s jaw. Bucky opened his eyes, and Steve was frowning thoughtfully. “You’re awful warm, Buck.”

“I know,” Bucky said. “I think I was all tangled in the blankets. I don’t usually sleep when it’s light out.” He was in his underwear, a grungy singlet and shorts, and the back of the undershirt was all soaked in sweat. 

“You just got bruises, or is the skin broken anywhere?” Steve asked. Steve had no medical training but his mother had spent his whole childhood patching up the whole neighborhood, so he knew a thing or two and it had been useful in the past. 

“Skin’s broken,” Bucky said, seeing where this was going. 

“Show me,” Steve said. 

Bucky sighed, and lay back and tugged up his shirt, showing the bandage. Steve gave him a long look, and Bucky bit his lip and unpinned the edge of it. 

Steve’s fingers were deft and cool as he unwound it, and he hissed as he peeled the dressing away where it was all stuck down. “This is big,” Steve said. “Bucky! There’s a lot— what happened?”

“Knife,” Bucky said. “Rory cleaned it up.”

“How the hell did you get knifed at your grandfather’s house,” Steve groused, but it wasn’t really a question, so Bucky didn’t make any effort to answer. Steve went and got a bowl of water and a washcloth, and got the dressing un-stuck with gentle care. Bucky bit the insides of his lips so he wouldn’t flinch or make a sound, but it was Steve who gave a pained hiss as he got it peeled away. 

“Jesus,” Steve said, stunned. “Jesus, Bucky!”

“He got me pretty good,” Bucky said, looking away. Rory had put seven neat stitches in with black silk thread. The skin was all angry and red, and it was starting to swell up, bruised all around.

“You get him back?” Steve asked, looking up and waiting patiently, in a familiar gesture, until Bucky met his gaze. 

“Jack did,” Bucky admitted. “We— we hadda pull him off him, he got real mad.”

“Did he kill him?” Steve asked. 

It was hard to look at Steve for too long, and Bucky looked down and away. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think we stopped him in time.”

“I heard a rumor that there was a fight last night,” Steve said, and now he wasn’t looking at Bucky, he had turned away to pull the medicine box out from under his bed. It had a lot of his mother’s things in it, and Bucky worked pretty hard on keeping it stocked to Steve’s tastes. “Joe Ciccaroni got his skull broke, they said. He might die, they said.”

Bucky swallowed. “I don’t know a Joe Ciccaroni,” he said. 

“His mother’s sister used to work with my mother’s friend Dolores Parker, remember her?” Bucky didn’t, he’d never known her. “Joe’s her second son, he’s a little older than us. Works at the docks, decent guy, never really had any enemies. You wouldn’t know why he’d be in a fight like that.”

“I wouldn’t,” Bucky said. 

“They said it was a gang thing, maybe about drugs,” Steve said, calm as anything. He set the medicine box on the edge of the bed and rummaged through it. It smelled sharply of herbs and chemicals, and made Bucky think of frightened nights staying up listening to Steve struggling to breathe. “You wouldn’t have anything to do with that, though.”

“I wouldn’t,” Bucky said, and he meant it. He had nothing to do with any of that. He was just occasional muscle. He honestly had no clue what the local gangs even got up to, drugs or booze or gambling or what.

“And I know,” Steve said, crossing a line into being too calm, “you wouldn’t lie to me about a thing like that, Buck.”

“I _wouldn’t_ ,” Bucky said, setting his jaw. 

Steve gazed at him for a long moment, coolly impassive, and Bucky returned his gaze unflinchingly. It was hard, but he managed to last until Steve looked away to fish the salve out of the medicine kit. “This’ll sting,” he said, no warmer than before, and while he wasn’t rough applying it, he wasn’t as careful as Bucky was used to him being. 

Bucky kept his teeth locked, stubborn, though it hurt like the devil. It felt like Steve was pressing really hard, but he could see he wasn’t, it was just that tender. “If it still hurts like that tomorrow morning we’ll have to see a doctor,” Steve said. 

“Okay,” Bucky said. Steve wiped his hands off, rebandaged the wound, and put the medicine kit away. 

“I got dinner on the way home,” Steve said. “You wanna come out and eat?”

Bucky sat up. He felt kind of shaky, and his arms were heavy. Putting a shirt on would be an awful lot of effort. “No,” he said, “I, I’m not hungry. I slept all afternoon, I don’t think I need anything right now. Thanks, though.”

“Okay,” Steve said, “I’ll wrap yours up for you.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said. He lay back down, rolled over, and fell asleep. 

 

 

Steve wasn’t afraid of Jack Murphy. He was the only person he knew who wasn’t afraid of Jack Murphy. (Bucky didn’t really seem that afraid of Jack Murphy, but he said he was. Steve was probably the only person who had noticed he was lying, possibly including himself.) 

Steve had both good and bad reasons for not being afraid of Jack Murphy. The bad reasons were that there was very little Steve was really afraid of, when it came to his personal safety. His own body was trying so hard to kill him that he didn’t really give external physical threats the respect they deserved, ever. He didn’t have a deathwish or anything, he just was kind of resigned to it in a way most people, he’d noticed, weren’t.

The good reasons were that he had noticed that Jack Murphy wasn’t vicious or cruel. He wasn’t even predatory. He generally watched everything with pale quiet eyes, missed nothing, only got involved when it was needed. Steve had never seen him be violent. He knew he was capable of it, sure, but he’d seen that same look in Bucky’s eyes, and knew, though he doubted Bucky had figured it out yet, that _he_ was capable of it too. 

So he asked Jack what had happened to Bucky. Just went straight up to him at the end of the work day while Jack was locking up the machine room, and asked who’d stuck a knife in Bucky.

Jack considered him, light shifting behind his pale eyes. “What’s Bucky told you?” he asked. Steve had left the troublesome individual in question at home that morning, too feverish and shaky to come to work, too stubborn to let Steve stay home with him.

“Precious little,” Steve said. “Family business, he said. And I can see how that’s none of mine, but Bucky’s my concern and if he’s going to get killed I want to know why.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed a moment, but then he tilted his head as if in acknowledgement. “I’ve had this conversation with several wives over the years,” he said, and it took Steve a moment to recognize that the strange tone in his voice was amusement. “I suppose this ain’t so different. You’re as much family as them.” 

“It ain’t like that,” Steve said uncomfortably. He was dimly aware that he and Bucky were closer than friends tended to be and some of the things they did together were maybe a little over the line, but it really, it wasn’t like _that_.

“Oh,” Jack said, “ _that_ ain’t my business, tog bog é.” Steve didn’t understand the phrase exactly but he’d heard it plenty as an interjection. “Point is— well, come walk with me a minute.” He jerked his head, and led Steve back into the office he’d just come out of. Everyone else was gone, and the lights were mostly out. Steve knew better than to think Jack was trying to intimidate him. Jack didn’t bother with that sort of thing. 

“It’s a good kid you are, Rogers,” Jack said. “And you’ve been good for Bucky. The reputation you’ve got, though, for bein’ kind of a goody two-shoes? You tell me. You probably got your suspicions as to what’s going on. You tell me what your reaction is goin’ to be.”

“I heard a rumor the Murphy Boys run moonshine,” Steve said. 

Jack raised both eyebrows at that. “Boyo,” he said finally, “I almost wish it was that simple. No. Nobody runs shine anymore. You can just buy liquor at the store now, there’s no reason to break the law.”

Swallowing embarrassment (Jack was right, smuggling booze was the stuff of sensational news stories from Steve’s childhood), Steve said, “Anymore.”

Jack inclined his head slowly. “We used to,” he said. “It’s not us, particularly. We really are what we say we are on paper. But we’re also a part of a community. And a part of the community has always been the gangs.”

“It ain’t that I’m a goody two-shoes,” Steve said warily. “But I don’t like bullies.”

“Neither do I,” Jack said. “And that’s our issue. It’s too greedy most of the Irish gangs were, during the Prohibition, too involved in all that craziness. Wiped each other out, the devil with them. Now the Italian mob is expanding. Want to run their protection rackets in this neighborhood.” Jack shook his head. “We don’t want a war or nothing like that. But we don’t want them here either. We can protect ourselves, thanks. And so we do.”

Steve considered that uneasily. “I don’t know that I understand,” he said. 

“We’re not a gang,” Jack said. “But we’ve got connections to ‘em. And when they need us, we go along.”

“And break people’s skulls,” Steve said, almost reluctantly; he understood, he thought, what Jack was getting at, and he could almost sympathize, but…

Jack breathed out a little sharply, and looked over Steve’s shoulder, face tight. “I did that,” he said. “That was me. It wasn’t to kill the kid I was after, but I wasn’t tryin’ not to, because he wasn’t tryin’ to miss Bucky when he went for him.”

“He ain’t dead but they don’t know that he’ll make it,” Steve said. 

Jack’s pale eyes focused on Steve’s for a moment, silent and considering. “And how’s Bucky?”

“Poorly,” Steve admitted. It was just a simple infection, but there was nothing to be done if Bucky’s body couldn’t fight it off. There were chemicals that could stop bacteria from growing, but nothing that could dislodge them once they had taken hold. Bucky was young and strong and otherwise in good health, but Steve knew bitterly that that wasn’t always enough. 

“You don’t bring a knife to a fistfight,” Jack said. “Once you take that kind of step all bets are off.” He shook his head. “It’s not a game. There’s no points for showmanship and no do-overs if you misunderstood the rules.”

Steve nodded. 

“And you can say to yourself, I won’t involve myself with organizations that are outside the law,” Jack said, “and maybe it’s fortunate enough you’ll be, that you’ll never have to come up hard against the realization that the law itself is corrupt and there is no higher authority. But it’s the truth on it: all you have in the end is your own two hands and what you can protect with them.”

Jack wasn’t the type who talked with his hands, he kept them by his sides or in his pockets. But he held them up now, palms up, out in front of him, and they were dirty and callused and scarred because he was a metalworker. They looked just like Bucky’s, down to the shape of the long, broad thumb. 

“There have always been gangs in New York,” Jack said. “We Irish especially, we’ve always banded together, because if there is one thing we know, as a people, it’s that there is no limit to human brutality. So you throw your lot in with people you think you can understand. And you show up when you’re asked. And you do what’s necessary. There are two kinds of people, Rogers. The kind who know what they’re capable of and the kind who lie to themselves. That’s the only difference.” 

He looked up from his hands, pinned Steve with a pale-eyed steady glance. “So that’s the truth of the Murphy Boys. And if you wanted to stay the second kind of person you should have asked Tommy, not me.”

Tommy, Bucky’s cousin, oldest of his uncle Conor’s children, was a notorious bullshitter, who could charm the mortar out of a brick wall. Almost nothing he ever said was based in fact but it was always said so prettily no-one ever minded. He generally ran all business negotiations. Steve distrusted him but couldn’t find it in his heart to dislike him. 

“You know that’s not my style,” Steve said. 

“It’s not,” Jack agreed. He put a hand on Steve’s shoulder— he wasn’t a handsy sort; most of the Murphy clan were (including Bucky, who didn’t seem to be able to converse with someone he wasn’t in physical contact with in some way), but not Jack— and gently steered him out of the office. “And it’s not really Bucky’s style either, though he will if he has to, for now. God willing he leads an easy enough life that it doesn’t get beat out of him, go dte se un cead.”

“What?” Steve gave him a sidelong look. He’d heard the phrase before, but had never been able to place it.

“Go dte se un cead,” Jack said. “ _May he reach a hundred_. You don’t speak Irish.”

“Cupla focal,” Steve muttered— _a couple words_. 

Jack tightened his fingers on Steve’s shoulder. “You’re a good friend to him,” Jack said.

“I never had a brother,” Steve offered, though he really didn’t know if that even came close to covering it.

“If you did,” Jack said, “it’s a disappointment he’d be, next to what you have.” They were at the front door of the shop now, and he gave Steve a tight nod, releasing his shoulder. “Off with you now, and you send for us if there’s aught you need.”

“I will,” Steve said. 

“I’ll send Declan by to check up on you before night,” Jack said. Declan was his oldest son, a gangly fourteen who thought Bucky the most glamorous person ever to have lived. “But send word if there’s something before that.” 

“I will,” Steve said again, and Jack nodded curtly and walked away. Steve watched him go a moment, then headed for home.

 

The lights were out, though night had fallen. Steve turned on the kitchen light and spotted a piece of paper on the kitchen counter. He picked it up, recognizing Bucky’s mom’s angular writing. 

_Steve_

_Came by for a bit— left you some food in the icebox— that’s for both of you— Rory says the important thing is to keep J’s fever down but I don’t have to tell you how to do that— R also says if J falls asleep and won’t wake send for him right away— I’d have stayed longer but J was very out of sorts and saying cruel things— I will stop by again first thing a.m. if I don’t hear before— love to you both— MB_

She was a tremendous fan of the long dash as all-purpose punctuation, Steve thought fondly. It wasn’t hard to guess what sort of things Bucky might not be feeling well enough to keep from saying, and they were probably all about Jim Sr. Bucky spent a lot of effort on a daily basis bottling up things he badly wanted to say about his father. Steve had been dumb enough to say something about it being better than not having a father but that had happened precisely one time, and it had been before he’d seen for himself quite how much damage the elder James inflicted upon the younger. He and Bucky had both wound up crying by the end of that conversation. It wasn’t an experience Steve ever wanted to repeat.

Steve rummaged in the icebox and found, to his satisfaction, that Mary Barnes had brought over her truly excellent oxtail soup. He put the saucepan of it on the stove and turned on the burner, then went in search of the patient. 

“Bucky,” he said, and turned on the lamp in the bedroom. Bucky was curled loosely on his side on his bed on top of the covers, skin flushed and hair damp, wearing only underwear, but at least it was a different set of shorts and singlet than he’d been wearing that morning so he’d been out of bed at some point. He didn’t react to Steve, and Steve frowned, sitting down on the edge of the bed to put his hand to Bucky’s forehead. It was startlingly hot, a very bad sign. “Bucky,” Steve said again. Mary shouldn’t have left him alone like this. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, blinking vaguely and stirring. He visibly took a moment to register who Steve was, then smiled a little. “Hey. There you are.”

“Sit up, c’mon,” Steve said. “You eat anything today?” He’d noticed last night’s dinner still wrapped up, but with everything Mary had brought over it was impossible to tell if she’d managed to stop defending her idiot husband long enough to actually take care of her son. 

Oh, Steve had _very_ little love for James Barnes Sr.

“Dunno,” Bucky said, and his face moved almost comically slowly into a parody of a determined expression as he gathered himself to sit up. Steve helped, manhandling him upright. Bucky was much bigger than Steve was, and bigger every time Steve paid attention. He’d reached his maximum height a year or two before, just a bit short of six feet, and he was filling out now from the rawboned gangly youth he’d been. He wasn’t a big man, but he was solidly-built and powerful, not broad but sturdy. Steve wasn’t jealous, exactly, just dumbfounded every time he took in how much more adulthood changed Bucky’s body than his. He himself was pretty much the same shape he’d been at fourteen, just a little taller and a little broader but not much. (The doctors had said his body wanted to grow more but had reached the limits of what his heart could power. His mother had admitted his dad had been six feet tall. Steve didn’t exactly feel cheated, but he sometimes wondered what that would be like.)

“Your mom brought soup,” Steve said, helping settle Bucky’s back against the wall. Bucky rubbed at his face and blinked at him. His bare arms were heavy, bulky, and the heat of his fever had the blue veins all dilated along the pale skin of the undersides of his arm, standing out along the cuts of muscle that were bigger, sharper-defined every time Steve noticed them. No, Bucky wasn’t a boy anymore, at all. 

“Soup’s okay,” Bucky said. “Your hands are freezing. Are you sick?” He peered suspiciously at Steve. 

“No, Bucky,” Steve said gently. “You got a fever.”

“Oh yeah,” Bucky said, with a faint air of revelation. Steve shook his head and went to get a bowl of cold water and some washcloths, and to stir the soup.

He came back and Bucky was listing markedly to one side, unfocused and sleepy. Steve climbed onto the bed and sat astride Bucky’s lap to pull him back upright, knowing he hadn’t the strength to do it from any other position. Bucky blinked at him and flinched as Steve put a cold washcloth around the back of his neck.

“Cold,” he said, but didn’t protest beyond that as Steve put another washcloth on his forehead. 

“You’re too hot,” Steve said. “Gotta keep the fever down so your brains don’t cook.”

“No great loss,” Bucky managed wryly, and Steve shoved down a flash of irritation at James Sr., because while it was one thing to knock Bucky around—everyone did it and Steve was guilty of it himself on occasion— it was quite another to have convinced Bucky he wasn’t very bright. It was the farthest thing from true, but the conviction was unshakeable in Bucky’s mind. 

“I need your brains,” Steve said, and pressed another cold cloth to the middle of Bucky’s chest, right over his heart. “You’re not much good to me without ‘em.”

Bucky shivered, and brought his arms up around Steve, embracing him like they were in this position for other than practical purposes. “Hey,” Steve said. 

Bucky gave him a crooked grin, one of his flirty ones. “Hey,” he said. “You wanna sit on my lap, you can do that anytime. You don’t gotta wait until I’m sick.”

“Well,” Steve said, “I sure ain’t doin’ it for _my_ health.” He turned the washcloth at the back of Bucky’s neck so the cooler side was against his skin, then pressed his thumb to Bucky’s lower lip. 

Bucky looked up at him, all feigned innocence. “Could you eat?” Steve asked, rather than letting himself get distracted. 

“Sure,” Bucky said, with a shrug. Steve climbed out of his lap and went to the kitchen.

He poured the soup into a couple of mugs, figuring they were easier to deal with than bowls. He wasn’t going to try to get Bucky out of bed; he was coherent for the moment but if he got to the kitchen and then couldn’t get back to bed, Steve wasn’t going to be able to get him there. He’d always been able to carry Bucky, or at least drag him, but by now Bucky probably had 75 pounds on him and he just flat couldn’t anymore. 

“Did you go to class?” Bucky asked, frowning at him as he came back.

“I did,” Steve said, “and to work. Your mom left a note, was she here a while?”

Bucky took the mug in both hands and frowned at it, not looking at Steve. “Yeah,” he said. His shoulders hunched a little. “She mostly just wanted to yell at me.”

“What’s she got to yell at you about?” Steve asked disdainfully, though he was putting it on for Bucky’s benefit. He knew fine well. He wasn’t much better, himself. Bucky didn’t deserve that much of a hard time from everybody. 

“I can’t make everybody happy,” Bucky said, staring fixedly down into his mug. His shoulders came in even tighter, which Steve hadn’t expected would be possible. “I can’t make _anybody_ happy.”

“Drink your soup and I’ll be happy,” Steve said. Bucky’s eyes darted over to him, at that, and gave him a strange look, but he complied. 

Steve took the mugs back to the kitchen when they’d finished, and came back with the medicine box. “Let’s have a look.”

It obviously hurt Bucky a lot. Rory must have pulled out two of the stitches earlier, Steve noted, to let the infected part of the wound drain. It was ugly, but Steve had seen worse, so he rebandaged it as delicately as he could. Bucky wasn’t making any noise but his breathing had gone ragged. 

Steve helped him spongebathe away some of the stink of a day and a half of fever, and made him change into clean underwear before letting him lie back down. Bucky was shivering by then. Steve pulled the covers up over him, and went to leave the room but Bucky caught at his wrist. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Bucky said pleadingly. “Not you too, Stevie.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” Steve said quietly, using his free hand to smooth Bucky’ s hair back away from his forehead.

“You are,” Bucky said. “You’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you,” Steve said. 

Bucky studied his face intently. “You always know what’s the right thing,” he said, soft and hoarse. “What’s that like, Steve?”

“No, I don’t,” Steve said. 

“If you was me,” Bucky said. “You’d know what to do. And even if it made my mom and my dad and my grandpa and all my cousins mad, you’d know what the right thing was, and you’d do it anyway. And I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what the right thing is. I never do.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, something twisting in his chest. Bucky looked so desperately sad. 

“You’d know,” Bucky said. “And you’d do it, and you’d stick to it, and whatever happened at least you’d know that. But I don’t know what that would be. I just know, whatever I done, it was the wrong thing but I don’t figure it out until after. I just try to be good and I always do the wrong thing.”

“No, you don’t,” Steve said. 

“I do,” Bucky said, and his eyes were tear-bright now. “I always do. I don’t think you can understand, Steve.”

“Bucky,” Steve said. “I do. I understand.”

Bucky shook his head. “You got, like, this bright shinin’ light in you,” he said. “I don’t have that. All I got is shadows. And I look at ‘em and I’m like, this one’s brighter, that’s probably the right way, and I go there and I get there and I realize it’s not really all that bright at all.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Steve said, smoothing Bucky’s hair down. “Buck. It’s okay. Just go to sleep.”

“No, I know what I’m sayin’,” Bucky said, agitated. 

“Shh,” Steve said. “We’ll talk about it in the morning, then. Okay?”

Bucky stared at him. “Okay,” he said, looking betrayed, and Steve walked away feeling like a heel. 

Steve checked on him every few minutes, changing the cold cloths on his neck and forehead. Bucky slipped into a confused half-sleep, mumbling forlornly at him. Steve finished the drawing he was supposed to do— text layout really, not at all his favorite thing, but so obviously useful it was hard to resent— and Declan stopped by and dropped off yet more food. Steve told him there wasn’t much change in his cousin’s condition, and he nodded solemnly and went home, very clearly impressed with himself at the seriousness of his errand. It was sort of a new feeling for Steve to feel old, but he would probably get used to it if he lived long enough.

He didn’t have a lot of illusions about how things would go if Bucky didn’t make it. He wouldn’t have a clue how to live in a world without Bucky in it.

Steve shoved his bed over next to Bucky’s. It wasn’t winter yet, wasn’t cold enough for their usual self-justification, but this way he could check up on Bucky without getting up. Bucky sighed and rolled over, curling into Steve’s space, and in the dark, Steve leaned in and kissed his mouth. 

“Steve,” Bucky murmured.

“It’s gonna be okay, Buck,” Steve said. 

“It hurts real bad, Steve,” Bucky said, almost in a whisper. 

“I bet it does,” Steve said. “I’m sorry for that.”

“It better not kill me,” Bucky said. 

“It better not,” Steve agreed. 

“If I die I won’t ever see you again,” Bucky said. 

“Course you will,” Steve said. “Catholics don’t really go to a different Heaven.”

Bucky shook his head, a movement more audible than visible in the dark, his weight rustling against the pillowcase. “Ain’t that, Steve,” he said. 

“Then what?” Steve asked. 

“You’re so good,” Bucky said. “And I’m not. And I tried, but, I’m just not. I can’t figure out how to fix it.”

“You’re not going to Hell, Buck,” Steve said. “Cut that out.”

_(New York, 2014)_

“I am, though,” Bucky said, desperately sad. “It ain’t— I’m not like you, Steve.” 

“None of this is your fault, Bucky,” Steve said. 

The pain was like fire, running all through his veins, the fever high— his shoulder— when had he hurt his shoulder? “Steve,” Bucky said, then opened his eyes in confusion. It was bright— had he slept? It was morning. Daytime. Outdoors. Steve was holding him, looking down at him. “What,” he said, blinking. 

“It’s gonna be okay, Buck,” Steve said. 

“It hurts real bad, Steve,” Bucky said, bewildered, disoriented— was Steve crying? Where were they?

“I bet it does,” Steve said, “I bet it does, Bucky. I’m sorry for that. Not much longer. Help is coming.”

It was windy, there was a helicopter. People were shouting. “Where,” Bucky said, blinking. “Where are we?”

“We’re still on the roof,” Steve said. “Shh. It’s okay, Bucky. It’s okay. We won. They’re gone.”

“Who,” Bucky said, frowning— sky— couldn’t move his left arm— Steve’s shoulders were so broad they shaded him as he hunched over— when had Steve gotten so big. “I thought you were smaller,” he said, dazed. 

Steve made a noise that was either laughing or crying. “I was,” he said, “seventy-five years ago, Bucky.”

“I,” Bucky said, and stared up at him, mind ticking over slowly, “seventy-five,” and he thought about it for a moment, then gave up and passed out. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for Ch 1:  
> * Throwback to the finale of the movie-- overdone? Trying to set something up though. We shall see. 
> 
> * Steve is Protestant? What? So here's the thing, in all the 616 stuff I've glancingly read, he's Catholic. But someone had a photo of the dogtags worn by the character in TFA, and right there, next to the hilariously fake serial number (I think it was 10234567), was a shiny debossed P for Protestant. Which could be carelessness in the props department (because seriously, the serial? c'mon), but I thought, well hell, and went for it. It gives a tension to the origin story, that I figured I'd go for and see where it went. 
> 
> * Brooklyn: Disclosure, my father's family is all Irish-Americans who immigrated to NYC in the 1910s, so. You'd think I pulled tons of inspiration from that, but no, they were all staunchly apolitical and tried to leave their accents behind and blend in, named their kids outta the Bible, never used Gaelic, disdained the Old Country that had let them down, moved out to the suburbs. I stole Jack Murphy straight out of the folklore of one of my best friends, whose great-grandpa fled the Irish War of Independence with a bounty on his head from the Crown, and ran straight to Tennessee where he founded a shine-running empire and spoke Irish til the day he died.  
> (Romanticizing the Old Country, for my family, didn't come up until the second generation born here, my dad's generation, which is why as a child I learned the entire back catalogue of the Clancy Brothers and if you'd like a song about the 1916 Easter Rising I could sing you four from memory without stopping. You want 'em I got 'em. Learning the context? That came later.)
> 
> * Buntus Cainte: The dialogue between Bucky and Mrs. Ferguson is a massive inside joke purely to myself. It is the first dialogue in [the textbook](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunt%C3%BAs_Cainte) my then best friend and I used to learn Irish our freshman year of high school, which is precisely twenty years ago, and I still not only have it memorized, but can spell it.  
> I am no longer in touch with the girl I was best friends with then, however, so there is no one to laugh with me at this, no one to repeat it back with me-- I empathize with Steve Rogers on a much, much lesser level. How sad, when the only one who gets your inside joke is you? Is this poignant or pathetic? 
> 
> It's cool, don't answer that.
> 
> (I saw her, fourteen years ago, on the crowded 6 train, as the doors were closing, and she shouted to me "oh my god! email me! myname at hotmail!" and I did, and it bounced. Her name is incredibly unusual and yet is not in Google, and she doesn't write in to the alumni magazine. B'fearr liom thu na cead bo bhainne, acushla. I thought you'd be Secretary of State by now.)
> 
> I also looked up some basic phrases in Google (mostly to confirm that I still could spell Buiochas correctly) and here's a good page for the real basic stuff. But good luck pronouncing it. http://english.glendale.cc.ca.us/gaelic.html
> 
> * Oh, the title. Go Dte Tu An Cead is one of those things that's supposed to be a blessing and it sounds sweet and all, may you live to a hundred, but for Bucky? Well, it's likely, but not for good reasons. He's only got three years to go now.


	2. In Times Of Trouble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bucky undergoes unpleasant medical procedures, Tony goes way outside his comfort zone again, Steve's a tormented guinea pig, and Sam is, as usual, mostly perfect.   
> Warnings for vague medical unpleasantness and references to past torture and violence. Bucky's less horrified than everyone else.

“Bucky,” Steve said, over and over, holding him so he wouldn’t thrash right off the gurney, “Bucky, hey, it’s okay, it’s me, I’m here.”

“No,” Bucky kept saying, “no, no, I won’t— no—“ His struggles were more convulsive than effective; he clearly didn’t have much strength left. Combined with his deathly pallor and obvious high temperature it was pretty clear Tony hadn’t exaggerated how thoroughly-poisoned he was.

“Seriously,” the doctor said, “we have to get him taken care of pronto, we’re into the threshhold of permanent organ damage.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, and pressed his cheek right against Bucky’s burning hot cheek, holding him motionless with his body. “Bucky. Hey. It’s me.”

Bucky finally went still, chest heaving with his rapid breaths— he was burning up, and his struggles were only worsening the damage to his collarbone. He was pretty literally tearing himself apart. “Steve,” he said, voice hitching a little, uncertain. 

“Yes. Bucky. It’s me. It’s me. We won’t hurt you,” Steve said.

Bucky’s breathing slowed a little, and the tension eased out of his limbs. “Steve,” he said again. 

Steve pulled back enough to look into his face. “I’m here,” he said. “I’ve got you. You’re safe. You have to let us help you. It’s okay.”

Bucky looked up at him, focusing on his face with some difficulty. “I don’t want—“ he said, wide-eyed and frantic, “I can’t lose it, I _can’t_.”

“We won’t take it,” Steve said. “You get to keep it. All of it. You won, Bucky. You beat them. You get to keep all of it.”

Bucky stared at him for a long moment, then smiled a little, looking nothing so much as like he was humoring Steve. “This is the only part I like,” he said, and bit his lip, studying Steve’s face. “When I get to see you.”

Steve had Bucky’s real arm pinned down, clamped securely around the wrist with his left hand while his right arm was braced across Bucky’s chest, and he nodded at the doctor to try to start the IV now while he was holding still. He looked back and Bucky’s smile had gone more crooked. “Bucky, it’s okay,” he said. 

“I know you’re not real,” Bucky said, like he was confiding a secret. “That’s the thing, I always knew. They thought they were fooling me, I think. But I knew. I just didn’t care. This is my favorite part.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked. “I’m real.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky assured him. “I’m not mad. I know it’s how it has to be.” His face tightened for a flash; Steve flicked his eyes over and saw the doctor had succeeded at sliding the needle into the vein of his arm. 

“I’m real,” Steve insisted. “It’s over.”

Bucky stared at him like he was memorizing his face. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. He looked exhausted, his face pale and drawn and sweaty, streaked with blood and grime. “I’ll go quietly. I always do. I won’t fight anymore.” 

“Bucky,” Steve said warily. Bucky’s expression was too calm, too sweet— it was too sharp a contrast from what he’d just been doing. He’d attribute it to sedatives, but he knew fine well sedatives didn’t work correctly on him, and probably wouldn’t on Bucky, and they’d been over that with the medical staff and so there were no sedatives in that IV. 

Bucky licked his lower lip, studying Steve, looking wistful, but there was definitely something duplicitous there— too innocent, too focused. Steve knew that look. He didn’t let go. 

“We need to get the blood filtration started,” the doctor said. “Once that’s going, then we’ll set the bone and evaluate whether we’ll need to do surgery. The filtration is the most urgent matter. And it _is_ urgent.”

Bucky’s eyelids flickered as he looked briefly at her before returning his attention to Steve. “You can let them put the restraints on,” Bucky said. “It’s okay. I’m done fighting.”

“Of course you are,” Steve said, balancing carefully as they wheeled the gurney over toward an intimidating-looking machine. “I’ll let go in a minute. I just want to make sure they get this right. You’re really gonna need to hold still, Buck.”

“If he tears the IV out in the middle of this he could bleed to death,” the doctor said. She made a face. “Are you sure we can’t sedate him?”

“I’m sure,” Steve said. 

“I want to at least attempt some pain management,” the doctor said. Bucky was tracking her in his peripheral vision, which was eerie; he hadn’t shifted his gaze away from Steve’s face at all, was giving no obvious indication, but it was clear from the way his expression had gone just a little fixed that he was watching her intently from the sides of his eyes. 

“We just don’t know what will be compatible with his metabolism,” Steve said. 

“We’ve started the analysis of the blood sample we managed to get,” the doctor said. “We should have a better idea soon.”

Steve waited a moment, then looked down at Bucky and made himself smile. “You hear that? You’re gonna be okay, we just need you to hold still. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Okay, Steve.” He smiled up, and it was one hundred percent Bucky Barnes’ fake sure-okay-whatever grin, the one that meant that he was going to smile until you turned away and then he was going to punch you in the back of the head. It was the eyes, the way they were tight at the corners; he was completely out for blood.

Bucky had always fought dirty. No, that wasn’t it; he’d always done whatever it took, regardless of anybody’s rules.

“Hold off just a second,” Steve said to the doctor, “let’s make him a little more comfortable,” and smiled down at Bucky, and eased his weight up off him, unpinning him. The doctor paused, looking curiously at him, but he couldn’t give her a signal without tipping Bucky off. He moved slowly back, trying to look like he really meant it, and watched as casually as he could manage until sure enough, Bucky’s grin tightened up at one corner and he surged up with inhuman speed to snap the heel of his hand into Steve’s jaw. 

Fortunately Steve had inhuman speed too, and he had Bucky’s wrist pinned back down before he could move far enough to tear out the IV, had his weight back on him, his face right down next to Bucky’s face. “I knew you were gonna do that, Buck,” Steve said, heart breaking, “because I’m really Steve Rogers and I really know you and I really know that fake grin of yours.”

“I didn’t mean it,” Bucky said, ragged, desperate, trying really hard to sound normal. “I was, it was a muscle spasm, I didn’t— I know— I know you’re real, Steve, I know you’re not going to— you’re not going to take it all away again—“ 

He was terrified, was the thing; Bucky was terrified out of his mind and on the verge of tears and bluffing for all he was worth with what little he had left. The doctor, the orderlies, and the nurse had all withdrawn across the room at his violent motion and were watching in alarm, when Steve spared a glance. 

“I know you guys don’t understand,” Steve said, “but they’ve been torturing him for seventy years.”

“I do understand,” the doctor sad, “but if we can’t sedate him we have to restrain him.” 

Steve closed his eyes for a moment. Natasha would know what to do, but she was still in surgery, barely alive, getting her lung repaired. “Bucky,” he said, pleading, “I don’t know whatkinda stuff they did to you but it’s me, it’s really me, I’m really not going to let them hurt you.”

“Course not,” Bucky said bleakly, and his face had gone blank, resigned. 

“Hey there,” Tony said, coming up next to Steve, closer than any of the medical personnel dared approach. “Am I interrupting a personal moment, here?”

Steve glowered at Tony. “He thinks we’re going to wipe him,” he said.

“Howard,” Bucky said softly, wonderingly. Steve looked at him. He was staring at Tony, and his eyelids flickered uncertainly, a minute flinch.

“That’s Howard’s son Tony,” Steve said. “You’ve met him.”

“No, Anthony’s just a kid,” Bucky said. “I never met him. Howard said—” He was staring fixedly at Tony, but flicked an uncertain glance at Steve, almost a cringe. “I mean. He wasn’t talking to me. But. He mentioned him.”

Steve stared at him for a long moment, then followed his gaze back to Tony. Tony was frowning at Bucky. “I wasn’t… talking to you?” Tony prompted. 

Bucky’s eyebrows pinched together. “No, you were… progress… on the project, you wanted…” He trailed off, squinted. “No. Tony. I know you. You — my arm. You— it hurt. You helped. Tony. I know you.” He took a deep breath, blinked, and looked around. “Steve. Tony. Yeah. Wait, we— did we win?”

“We won, Buck,” Steve said, looking over at Tony, who was wearing a profoundly disturbed expression. He was probably reaching the same conclusion as Steve, who had pretty much instantly calculated that Bucky had ‘died’ at the very least twenty years before Tony had been born. 

Which really only left one conclusion, which wasn’t something Steve could bear to consider. And it was probably even harder for Tony to deal with.

“Christ,” Tony said, sounding deeply rattled. 

“I didn’t, I didn’t think you were real,” Bucky said, staring at Steve. 

“I am real, Buck,” Steve said, easing up enough to lift the hand that was pinning Bucky’s chest to his face instead. He rubbed his thumb across Bucky’s cheekbone.

Bucky’s eyes sank closed, and Steve looked over to the doctor and nodded sharply. She looked hesitant, but stepped forward gamely. “One of them looked like you,” Bucky said thickly. “I used to get so confused. And— they must have known, Steve. The whole time. He knew who I was, knew who I thought he was— and every time I almost figured it out they wiped me and I had to start over.” His face was tight, creased in pain, and a tear leaked from beneath one of his eyelids. 

Steve wiped it away with his thumb. “It’s okay, Buck,” he said. The doctor approached gingerly with the tubing from the machine, and caught his eye. “Hey,” he said softly. “Buck. We gotta hook you up to a filter machine to get the poison from your blood. You remember, about the power source in your arm?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, not opening his eyes. “Okay.”

Steve nodded at the doctor, and she said quietly, “You might feel a tug on this arm. It should only hurt for a moment. Let me know if it doesn’t stop hurting.”

Bucky breathed in, and looked over at her without moving his head. “It’s okay if it hurts,” he said.

“It shouldn’t though,” she said, and deftly slid the tubing over the already-inserted IV port. “If it does, something’s wrong.” She rubbed at another spot on his arm. “I have to put a second needle in. It might pinch.”

“Okay,” he said. She did it smoothly enough that Steve wasn’t even sure what had happened. Then the tubing turned dark red, and Steve had to look away, disconcerted, as she taped everything down securely. 

Tony came closer and stood next to Bucky’s left arm, which was still wrapped in dirty, bloody bandages and tied in a makeshift sling. “I have to do more work on this thing,” he said, sounding subdued. “I, the thing is, I can’t put a new power source in, it’s too damaged. And with the injury to the surrounding area, it’s too heavy to leave it on there as a dead weight. I have to remove it. We have to remove it. It’s going to take surgery, I think. A number of the attachment points extend deep under the skin, and there are supports drilled through bone in the arm.”

Bucky opened his eyes, but didn’t look at Tony. “It doesn’t come off,” he agreed quietly, looking down submissively. 

“How did they do maintenance?” Tony asked.

Bucky made a face, still looking away. “With it attached,” he said. “Mostly. The lower part…” He bit his lip. “They took that off sometimes, I think. But it— it wasn’t that it comes off easily, it’s that they dismantled it.”

“I could remove everything below the elbow,” Tony said. “It’s just— there’s got to be a way to turn it off so you don’t feel everything I do.”

Bucky flicked a glance up at him, looking resigned. “There isn’t,” he said. 

Tony looked over at the doctor. “I’m not doing this without anaesthesia,” he said. “Just getting the power source out was awful. I was torturing him! I’m not doing that again.”

“What about a local,” the doctor said, and she was watching Steve’s face. “Do those work? Could I do a nerve block on the whole area?”

Steve considered it. “Probably,” he said. “You have my medical file, right? They did a nerve block on me in… I think March of last year, but I don’t know what they used. It was effective for about twenty minutes.”

“We’ll start with that,” the doctor said, nodding to one of the nurses. 

 

Steve saw the moment Bucky’s arm went numb. Bucky’s face suddenly went slack, and he looked blankly alarmed. “It— gone,” he said. He’d been obediently still, subdued and quiet for the last ten minutes as they’d set up the nerve block, even when they’d unbandaged his arm and freed it from the sling, which clearly had hurt him. Three and a half hours to go at least on the blood filter machine, and Tony was standing uncharacteristically silent and still in the corner of the room staring at him with dark eyes. And Steve was still sitting on Bucky, hadn’t been able to convince himself to move. He had most of his weight on his own knees, only pressing lightly against Bucky’s thighs, his right hand lightly against Bucky’s breastbone and his left still wrapped loosely around Bucky’s right wrist. 

He was only about 70% sure Bucky wouldn’t panic and try to escape again, was the reason. Bucky was mostly staring at him, with a heartbreaking mixture of wariness and disbelief, and a hint of the calm watchfulness of a predator. The most unnerving part was probably that it wasn’t at all a strange look to see in his eyes; seeing Bucky now, as the Winter Soldier, was driving home just how fucked-up the Bucky Barnes of 1944 had really been, because _it was all familiar_.

“Tony,” Steve said. Tony’s eyes shifted minutely, from Bucky to him. Steve jerked his head at Bucky’s left arm. Tony visibly changed the set of his shoulders and stepped forward. 

Bucky was watching from his peripheral vision again. It was like he thought he wasn’t allowed to look away from Steve. “Bucky,” Steve said. “Hey. They gotta get the prosthetic arm off, and then they can fix your collarbone. That make sense to you?”

“I can’t feel it,” Bucky said, quiet and hoarse. Then, a little tighter, “I can’t feel it.”

“It’s not gone,” Steve said, catching on to the faint thread of horror under Bucky’s tone. “We’re not cutting anything off that’s part of you. We’re not taking anything we can’t put back on. We just have to take it off to fix it.”

“I can’t get all of this off,” Tony said. “I’m going to need a surgeon to remove the rest of it, not an engineer. I’m just going to take up to the elbow joint.”

It wasn’t right, Tony really should have been talking a mile a minute about fifty irrelevant things, should have been expressing opinions and pushing Steve’s buttons as hard as he could. It was probably better that he wasn’t, from a standpoint of keeping Bucky calm, but Steve knew it was a bad sign. He wished he had some way of calling someone who was better about handling Tony, because Tony definitely needed handling and all he knew was that he himself was terrible at that. 

So he bit back his first fumbling impulse to say something, and focused on watching Bucky, who was looking calm and blank and absolutely fucking terrified. 

“Whoever designed this was some kind of genius,” Tony said, “but an evil one and I hope he’s dead.” It was a refreshingly Tony thing to say, and Steve half-smiled. 

Bucky gave no sign of any kind of reaction, but his whole body went tense under Steve. Steve blinked at him; the only change in his facial expression was that his focus had changed and he was staring through Steve now, breathing a little harder, more evidently pretending he wasn’t right at the edge of what he could take. 

“Can you feel that, Buck?” Steve asked. 

Bucky didn’t answer, but his jaw moved, and Steve recognized the expression; he was biting down on the inside of his mouth to keep from making a sound. 

“Tony,” Steve said, “wait.”

Tony looked up. “What’s wrong?”

Steve shook his head. “Bucky,” he said. “Tell me. You can feel something?”

It wasn’t that Bucky was reacting to noise; Tony was only using hand pliers at the moment to pry open an access hatch. Tony looked from Bucky to Steve, then over to Bucky’s shoulder, then made a disgusted noise. 

“They’ve blocked his nerves,” Tony said, “and that means he can’t feel the flesh and blood parts. But the neural transmitters in the lower arm are still working, I’d bet you.”

“Can you disable them?”

“The receivers are in his brain,” Tony said, “so no, not really. Neurosurgery is even farther out of my realm of expertise than this is.” He frowned over at Bucky. “How can you tell? He didn’t say anything.”

“I can tell,” Steve said. Bucky was staring at him, maintaining eye contact, not reacting to anything, but Steve knew he was wondering the same thing. “I know you, Bucky, I’ve known you since we were kids. I know how you hold your mouth when something hurts and you’re trying not to let on. I know how your eyelids pinch when you’re lying. I know how your eyes look when you’re trying to hide how scared you are. I know you, Buck.”

“I don’t,” Bucky said, and Steve felt the tremor go through him, through the long muscles of his legs and up through his body. “— I don’t— I remember— Steve. I remember.” He was shaking now. 

“And you know me,” Steve said quietly, bending closer to him. He moved his hand up to Bucky’s face again, smoothing his thumb along the corner of Bucky’s mouth, moving up to cradle his cheek in his hand. Bucky didn’t look much older than he had, really— more fine lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, he looked maybe thirty-five at the outside. His eyes were the same clear blue, his mouth still had the same curve. 

“I do,” Bucky said, exhaling shakily. “I, I remember you, Steve.” 

“And I’m real,” Steve said. “I’m really here, and it’s really me, and you’re really here, and we really beat them.”

Tony did something and Bucky went tense again. “Gimme a second,” Tony said, “I’m gonna find the transmitters and see if I can at least disconnect them. Just hang on, okay?”

“It’s okay,” Bucky said. “Do what you have to, Tony.”

“I’m just gonna do it fast,” Tony said, and wrenched a panel off the arm. Bucky’s whole body went tense, his head tipping back, and Tony hesitated, looking at him.

“Don’t stop,” Bucky said thinly through his teeth. 

“Okay,” Tony said, and dug in. There was blood, and Steve looked down into Bucky’s face. 

Improbably, Bucky laughed, though there was something desperate in the sound. “Last time Tony did this it was Natasha holding me down,” he said. 

“You screamed more then too,” Tony said grimly. 

“Hurt more,” Bucky said. 

“So the nerve block is having some effect, then,” Steve said, feeling sick even as he tried to sound hopeful. 

“No,” Bucky said, “well, maybe.” His breath hitched as Tony pulled on something. 

“Hey,” Sam said, coming in; Steve glanced over at him, took in his hesitance, and gave him a taut half-smile. “Huh. I was gonna ask how it’s going in here but, uh.” 

“He was confused, a little bit ago,” Steve said, a little self-conscious about his maybe-boyfriend finding him straddling the guy he’d admitted he used to kind of have a thing with. “I had to persuade him to stay put. We’re kind of, we’re just staying like this for a little while.”

Sam nodded, and came closer. Bucky seemed to be able to look away from Steve, now; he turned his eyes, though not his head, to look at Sam. “Hey there,” Sam said. “You want us to call you Bucky?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “or, or Barnes, or whatever.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “How about I go with Barnes, for now, then. Hey Barnes. I’m the Falcon, you can call me Sam or Wilson or, you know, do some experimenting, see what I’ll answer to.”

“Nice to meet you,” Bucky said, blurry enough that it was clearly autopilot. Old Brooklyn reflex. 

“I probably know a lot more about you than you do about me,” Sam said, coming to stand near the bed on the opposite side from Tony. “So that’s kinda rude and I look forward to fixin’ that later.”

“You wrote the,” Bucky said, and stopped to suck in a breath at something Tony did. “Uh. The— the pamphlet— thing.”

“I edited it, yeah,” Sam said, “and kinda, collated it, and there’s some original research in there I guess. Yeah.”

“You—“ Bucky stopped, biting down against a noise of pain; his whole body twitched. He exhaled forcefully, dragged another breath in, and tipped his head back again, face tight. “It, there’s— it was good— nngh—“ 

“Are we not able to do anything to keep that from hurting him so much?” Sam asked. 

“Not really,” Steve said, a little tense; did Sam really think they wouldn’t have thought of that?

Sam made a face, and reached down to touch Bucky’s bared arm, watching for a reaction as he approached. There wasn’t one, so he curled his fingers loosely around the side, midway between elbow and shoulder. “Steve said you’d been confused but you were okay now?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “I remember—“ He stopped to pant a few quick breaths in and out. 

“So in the pamphlet,” Sam said, “I talked a bit about grounding techniques, that some of the guys use to help themselves remember where they are, like during flashbacks and stuff. Does any of that kind of thing help you?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Yeah, I—“ He stopped, hissed a breath in, went on. “Natasha— gave me little headphone things, I could— HYDRA didn’t know about Nicki Minaj, y’know?” The fleeting expression he gave Sam was actually a smile, and it stabbed Steve right between the ribs in kind of a good way. 

“What’s Nicki Minaj,” Steve said blankly. 

“Boss Ass Bitch,” Sam said. He glanced over at Steve, grinning broadly. “She’s a singer. Rapper.” 

“I should— write her a fan letter,” Bucky said. Tony made a quiet noise of frustration, and Bucky gave a startled exclamation before he could bite down on it. 

“I gotta use power tools,” Tony said. “I’m sorry. It’s too corroded to unbolt. It’s gonna be— I know it’s gonna be a bad noise. Vibrations won’t be a picnic either. I really wish this was easier.”

“Headphones,” Sam said, “we’re puttin’ at least one earbud on you, on that side, okay? Sound good?” 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. He looked up at Steve. “We’ll put the other one on you, give you an education.” He managed an expression that was actually a grin. 

 

 

 

Steve had made noises about getting off of Bucky, but Bucky unsurprisingly wanted to keep his Cap-body blanket. Sam’s discipline was pretty good, so he wasn’t finding it hot or anything inappropriate like that, nor was he wishing to trade places with either of them position-wise, but he was human enough that he was filing the thought away for later. 

Because Steve was still in the uniform, see, the bright blue one with the bright red and white, the media-friendly but bulletproof one. And Bucky had no shirt on and was maybe half-dead but also the kind of person who was even more attractive in person than in photos. So there was that. And there he was, fresh off seventy years of torture and a solid six-plus months of being a hunted fugitive and trying to crack jokes.

Bucky had insisted on one earbud for himself and the other for Steve, and Sam was DJ-ing from the playlists on Bucky’s phone. It was surely Natasha’s doing, the phone had been set up with unfettered access to a subscription-based music site, so Bucky could just search and find anything he wanted. He’d organized the music he liked into meticulously-labeled playlists within his library. It was really impressive, and Sam had to admit, probably better-curated than his own version of the same for Steve.

Sam amused himself with that for a little while, intrigued at Bucky’s choices— Bucky was clearly no fool, even if he equally-clearly came down pretty firmly on the East Coast side of the hip-hop rivalry. “No Tupac? Not at all?”

“He didn’t have that many albums,” Bucky said. “And you know. Brooklyn.”

“Two what,” Steve said blankly. 

“Seriously,” Sam said, “you seriously— I have taught you better than this, Steve. I could forgive you not knowing Nicki but— tell me you at least remember me teaching you about Biggie.”

“You been the one catchin’ this guy up on what he missed?” Bucky asked, and if his tone missed casual by about three miles, well, whatever Tony was doing was, actually, kicking up sparks. 

“I been trying,” Sam said. “He insists to me, even after all his time on stage, that he can’t dance.”

“Sure can’t,” Bucky said. “Not a bit. I tried, believe m— nngh!”

“It’s okay,” Steve said softly, and from his expression he was feeling it more than Bucky was. “It’s okay, Buck.” He definitely wasn’t listening to the earbud even a little. 

“Sweet Jesus,” Bucky said, letting his head fall back against the gurney— they’d tilted it so he was kind of half-sitting up, making it a little easier for Steve not to put any weight on Bucky’s broken collarbone. “That smarts.”

“Doing my best,” Tony said tightly. 

“Your reward is in heaven,” Bucky said, with a sarcastic-sweet edge. 

“Somebody’s got an awful lot of personality,” Tony said. 

“I try,” Bucky answered, and then he screamed and it was pretty terrible, and when his eyes opened they were blank as an animal’s and Steve reacted quicker than thought and had him pinned down as he thrashed against the gurney. Sam helped by grabbing his IV-filled arm and hanging on, but it was over as quick as it had started. 

“I—“ Bucky said shakily, staring up at Steve with a stricken expression, “I forgot— I forgot—“

“Hey,” Sam said, easing up on the arm, turning the touch into an encouraging pat, “hey, it’s okay, man. It’s okay. Barnes, you’re okay, you didn’t hurt anybody.”

Steve had his face turned away from Tony, all twisted-up, and Sam realized it was because he was crying, and trying his damnedest not to let on. Yeah, he could kind of see his point, it was pretty heartbreaking after everything Bucky had been through to have to be the one now holding him down while he got tortured yet more. 

“I’m like, _so_ close to being done,” Tony said, returning from the safe distance he’d hastily retreated to. “Like, thirty seconds close.”

“It’s okay, Steve,” Sam said, wiping his face for him. “You’re doin’ good too. Medals all around.”

“See,” Bucky said breathlessly, “that’s why I wanted you to stay where you was, Steve.”

“I’m right here,” Steve said thickly, keeping his face turned— ah, away from Tony. Tony was remarkably attitude-free in all this, Sam had observed. It was good, because he’d seen how Tony and Steve got along like, well, kind of like a house violently burning to the ground really, that it was hard to look away from, and the worst part was that both of them were really trying. 

“I know you are,” Bucky said. “Tony, do it, I promise I won’t freak out.”

“Doing it,” Tony said. 

Bucky’s head thumped back against the gurney and he made a noise that was a combination of a gasp and a whimper. Sparks flew, there was a quiet but profound _thunk_ , and both Tony and Bucky made funny little groaning noises. 

“Done,” Tony said, shoving his goggles up onto his forehead. 

Steve gave an affecting, near-silent whimper and subsided so far his head nearly came to rest on Bucky’s neck. Bucky went limp, closing his eyes, except for a few shivering twitches that shook him periodically. His right hand was shaking badly.

“There are still chunks of metal embedded in muscle and bone,” Tony said, “and while I got the transmitters disconnected you’ve still got active receivers I can’t touch so I don’t know what that’ll do, I don’t have the specs. You are still gonna need a lot of work. But at least the dead weight is gone and there won’t be any further chemical contamination.” He sounded nothing like his usual self— not that Sam was real familiar with him, but he was famously pretty chatty. Right now he sounded heavy, subdued and tired. 

Steve nodded, and Tony pulled his goggles off, stripped his gloves off. “I don’t want to do anything else until I get to sit down with you, though, Barnes, and really talk about what you want, because whatever it is, it’s not going to be something done _to_ you. It’s going to be something you _choose_. I’m not doing this again.”

“Okay,” Bucky said after a long moment. He looked up at Steve. “I think you can move now. If you want.”

Steve nodded, sitting back and slowly removing his hands from Bucky’s arm and chest. He stayed on Bucky’s legs a moment, wiping his face. Tony had put the half of the arm he’d removed into a cardboard box, which struck Sam as being both sensible and sensitive, and was loading tools in with it. He turned to go and Steve spoke. 

“Hey,” he said. “Tony. Wait.” He climbed slowly out of Bucky’s lap. Tony turned back, looking at him with a curiously flat expression. “Thank you,” Steve said, and held out his right hand. 

Tony blinked, then shook his hand. “Of course,” he said, affronted. 

“I’m,” Steve said, “I won’t say anything about— you know. You can, uh, that’s up to you.”

Tony frowned up at him, puzzled, then his eyebrows went up. “About Howard?”

“Yeah,” Steve said awkwardly. “That’s, it’s not. I just wanted to say that.”

Tony looked Steve up and down thoughtfully. “I appreciate the sentiment,” he said, “but I think it kind of has to be pursued, so…”

“I get that,” Steve said. “But that’s, it’s in your hands. I’m not— you know.”

Sam looked at Bucky, lost. Bucky didn’t seem to be paying attention, particularly. Sam remembered that there had been discussion of whether the Winter Soldier had assassinated Howard Stark, but this really didn’t sound like how he figured a conversation about that would go down. 

Well, it wasn’t his business. He touched Bucky’s arm gently. “You okay?”

“When I find myself in times of trouble,” Bucky said shakily, “Lady Gaga comes to me.”

Sam threw his head back and laughed. “That was good on like five different levels.”

“Been thinkin’ it up a while,” Bucky admitted, managing a sort of wavery smirk. 

“You made it through the Beatles?” Sam asked. 

“On fast-forward,” Bucky admitted. “I get it, I do, but. You know. I _get_ it.”

“Bunch of white guys,” Sam said. 

“Exactly,” Bucky said. “I go to the Internet searchy thing and I find a list of the top ten recorded albums of all time and fuckin’, eight of them are the goddamn Beatles. It wasn’t helpful.” There was an edge to his voice that belied his fluidly charming train of conversation, and Sam could see that he was trying very, very hard not to look at the metal stump of his former arm. His peripheral vision kept snagging on it and making him go still as he spoke. 

A petite woman, maybe Indian or Pakistani, Sam wasn’t so good at the Subcontinent, came forward; she was in scrubs and a white coat so it was pretty obvious she was some sort of medical professional. She approached Bucky’s left side carefully. 

“Mr. Barnes,” she said. “Has the nerve block helped at all with the pain from the collarbone?”

Bucky sized her up, trying not to look at his former arm. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry if I frightened your people. I’ve had a… troubled relationship with… medical procedures.”

“We have been briefed,” she said. “And I apologize for the necessity of this setting, but the blood filtration machine could not be moved.”

“I ain’t complainin’,” Bucky said, but his body language had gone all tight. 

“So what-all still needs to get done?” Sam asked, moving into Bucky’s space a little, putting his hand on his arm. He was wagering, from their earlier banter, that Bucky didn’t see him as a particular threat. It didn’t surprise him that the innermost circles of a formerly-Nazi organization’s science departments had perhaps not been particularly heavily populated by wisecracking Black men. He wouldn’t have expected there’d be a whole lot of petite, plump, middle-aged Indian-ish women there either but the white lab coat might kinda be the dealbreaker there.

“The collarbone needs to be stabilized,” the doctor said. “I have seen the scans and there is metal reinforcement in there that could be in a very, very dangerous condition by now. Whether or not Mr. Barnes has advanced super-soldier healing abilities, it remains a situation that must be addressed.”

Steve was standing behind the woman, arms crossed, thoughtful. Sam watched Bucky’s breathing pick up, even as his expression didn’t change. 

“I got a weird thought,” Sam said. “Doctor— I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

“Doctor Montazeri,” she said. 

“I might be a little off-base here,” Sam said, “but given our situation, I got a favor— could you maybe wear something that’s not a white lab coat for this? Just, I’m just riffin’ here.”

She blinked at him, then looked at Bucky. Bucky looked impassive for a long moment, then said, “God damn it, all this time nobody told me what a shitty poker face I got,” and Steve made a helpless noise that might have been a laugh but probably wasn’t from the way he turned away and put his hand over his mouth. 

“No,” Sam said, keeping his hand spread out with gentle pressure against Bucky’s bicep, “you just got smart friends now.”

“Oh,” the doctor said. “Oh!” She turned. “Yolanda, I have a maroon cardigan in the locker room, could you fetch it for me?”

“Of course,” one of the orderlies said, and left the room. The doctor shed her lab coat, first retrieving a few small items from its pockets, and came back over.

“I should have thought of that,” Dr. Montazeri said. “Part of the reason I even work here is that many of the people I see do not like hospitals or doctors.” She came back to Bucky’s side and while he didn’t exactly relax, he was less tense. 

“Come stand over here,” Sam said to Steve, who was looking lost. Steve looked at him forlornly for a moment, then collected himself and came and stood by him. Sam took Steve’s hand, tugged it free of where he had it crossed over his chest, and brought it down to where Bucky’s hand was wrapped around the railing of the gurney. 

“Hi,” Bucky said, giving him a tight half-smile before turning his attention back to the doctor. 

“Hi,” Steve said, hoarse. 

“We need to look into more sustainable pain management solutions for you,” the doctor said. “Your file is very incomplete. We were able to come up with a number of substances that worked on the Captain, here, despite his metabolism, so I would say with a fair degree of certainty that at least some of them would be effective for you. Now that the chemistry of your blood is approaching survivable levels again, it is time for us to look into that. We have samples of your blood being analyzed but, of course, chemistry can only tell us so much about a complex system like your metabolism.”

“Sure,” Bucky said, though he sounded pretty uncertain. 

“Do you have any recollection of what compounds have been used on you in the past?” the doctor asked patiently. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and rattled off something polysyllabic. The doctor frowned. “That was probably in Russian,” Bucky went in on a moment, contrite. “Sorry, I don’t know what it was called in English.”

“Oh,” the doctor said, “I recognize the name of the drug, it’s not that. It’s just… that drug has no known use for pain management.” She shook her head slowly. “Captain Rogers’ metabolism is astonishing in its rapidity, and resistance to most substances, but has not thusfar demonstrated any proclivity for a reaction that would change the nature of a drug’s interaction with the nervous system.”

“It wasn’t for pain,” Bucky said. “It was for when they did surgeries and stuff.”

The doctor shook her head. “It’s not a sedative either,” she said. 

“No,” Bucky said, “it sure isn’t.”

Sam glanced at Steve, who looked even more pale and about-to-be-sick than he’d been looking this whole time, and surmised Bucky had mentioned something about this before, but Steve was pretty obviously in no condition to discuss it. 

“So what the hell is it?” Sam asked. 

“It’s a paralyzing agent,” the doctor said, frowning deeply. “Mostly useful for immobilizing muscles, body parts, for local use, that kind of thing. How would that…”

“You give someone enough they can’t move anything,” Bucky said, “but they still breathe and their heart beats. They don’t even pass out.”

“It is surely fatally toxic far before you reach an efficacious dose for that applic—” and the doctor’s mouth shut with a snap as she remembered what sort of person she was talking to. “Are you quite serious?”

“Don’t really have much reason not to be,” Bucky said, jaw a grim line. “I assume you can get the stuff.”

“It’s quite commonplace,” the doctor said blankly, then looked horrified. “We are discussing pain management, not prisoner control. There would be no purpose in using such a drug on you, Mr. Barnes.”

“Stevie’s a superhero and all but not even he can reliably hold me down for an entire surgery,” Bucky said, cocky and drawling and completely dead behind the eyes. “You got delicate work to do, I’d rather not take my chances on not flinchin’.”

“We will find a better way,” the doctor said sternly. The orderly returned and she took her cardigan gratefully. It was indeed maroon, and had an argyle pattern around it and a little jeweled brooch pinned by the collar on the left side, and was about as un-clinical a garment as one could have. Bucky eyed it and despite himself flicked an amused glance at Sam, who shrugged. “Perhaps I am not a fashion plate,” the doctor said, much of her sternness melting away for a moment, “but I am a woman in her late fifties and I like to be comfortable.”

“It’s a nice brooch,” Bucky said. “And I kind of thought Sam was being a smartass but he’s not wrong.”

“Sam is a goddamn genius,” Steve said hoarsely. Sam leaned over, pressing his shoulder against Steve’s for a moment, and Steve pressed back. 

 

Steve sucked in a deep breath, digging his thumb into the spot between his eyebrows where his tension headaches tended to collect. He reached the other hand out blindly, and was rewarded by Sam taking it between both of his. 

“Hey,” Sam said. 

“Thank God you’re here,” Steve said. 

“Did it wear off yet?” Sam asked. Steve had become a drug-testing guinea pig when the first attempts at general pain relief for Bucky had proven completely ineffective. It had taken three attempts, followed of course by agonizing waits afterward for the useless drugs to metabolize out, before they’d found one that had worked. It had been heartbreaking to see how profound Bucky’s relief had been when they finally found something that eased the pain. Fortunately Steve hadn’t really been aware enough to fully take it in, since they’d been testing drug combinations on him; he was only now starting to really parse what he’d seen, and it was a distant kind of revelation he was still too foggy to fully feel.

“Nngh,” Steve answered. “Mostly.” 

“You okay?” Sam asked. 

“I watched him die,” Steve said, “I watched him fall at least five hundred feet to his certain demise, right, hear me out here Sam,” and he held his hand up when Sam would have interrupted. “I watched him, I didn’t take my eyes off his face. Right? And I still have never seen him as frightened as he was through this whole thing just now.”

Sam’s fingers tightened around his. “His self-control is pretty amazing,” Sam said. “I think if I were him— well, I’d’ve died years ago, let’s just leave it at that.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Steve said, and he was still too loopy to stop there and leave it a kind thing to say. “They wouldn’t have let you. They took that from him.” He looked up at Sam’s dismayed face. “They took that from me, too, but I signed up for it, and that’s the crucial difference.”

“You’re not immortal,” Sam said. 

“No,” Steve answered. “But whatever’s been done to me, I signed up for it.”

“Fair point,” Sam said. 

Bucky was unconscious. They hadn’t sedated him, he was just so exhausted and overwhelmed that he’d passed out. They had one restraint on him, around his chest, to keep him from slumping over too much. They’d put it on him while he was awake, partly at his request. He’d made it clear that they’d more normally restrained his arms so it didn’t bother him as much to have something around his chest. 

Steve had wound up on a gurney next to him, and was sitting with his legs dangling off the side, within arm’s reach of Bucky. Sam was sitting next to him, just close enough that his leg was pressed against Steve’s all the way from hip to knee. 

“He’s alive, though,” Steve said. 

“Yeah,” Sam said. “He is.”

 

* * * 

 

Pepper frowned at her phone. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I have to take this,” but didn’t walk away, she just moved off a step or two and said, “Steve?”

StarkTech phones were too good for there to be any extraneous sound escaping the speaker. She smiled at the inaudible greeting.

“Of course,” she said. “For you? Of course!”

Her expression shifted a little towards resigned. “Ah,” Pepper said, nodding. “Naturally.” She laughed. “I don’t really know his schedule, though.”

A longer pause, and she was smiling indulgently at her conversation partner.

“You can say it,” Pepper said. “He’s a jerk.” Her expression was fond and sweet, at odds with the words. “Steve,” she said gently, “have you had any sleep lately?”

Another long pause, and her expression went somber. “He told me about before,” she said, frowning sadly. “How he felt like he was torturing the guy. It did upset him.”

Steve spoke for a long time, and she chewed preoccupiedly at her lower lip. “You don’t have to be good at it,” she said. “I appreciate the warning. It’s all right, Steve.”

Pepper was silent a long moment. “Oh,” she said softly, sounding, perhaps, heartbroken. “Yes. I understand. Steve, thank you. I won’t let on that I was warned but I really do appreciate the heads-up.” She nodded at something, and collected herself. “You sound so sad, Steve. It’s all right.” She smiled sadly into the phone. “We always manage to sort these things out.”

A pause, then— “Testing drugs on you,” Pepper said, eyebrows raising. 

“Ah,” she said, “yes, I do see where this is going.” She nodded, listening, then laughed. “Don’t apologize. Steve, how are you so sweet?”

She nodded again, a quaint mannerism when on the phone. She was used to video calls, though, most likely. After all these years. 

“You know,” Pepper said, “I’ll let you know if I think of anything. It’s hard to do that kind of thing for Tony, though. Even I don’t really know what to do sometimes. But listen, the heads-up— thank you for that. I’ll start with the damage control and let you know if there’s anything you can do?”

She listened, then laughed. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said. “Mm-hmm.” Disconnecting the call, she looked at the phone for a moment, sighed, and turned back to the group. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to go take care of that. We’ve covered just about everything here, right? You’ve got what you need to proceed.”

Lakeisha and Dorothea looked at one another. “Yes ma’am,” Lakeisha said. “You know, you didn’t have to take care of this yourself. It means a lot that you made even this much time for us.”

Pepper laughed, gestured with her phone. “The Avengers mean a lot to me,” she said. “Or, really, a lot to Tony, and as ever, I get sucked in. But, you know. Or you wouldn’t be here.”

“True,” Lakeisha said, and Dorothea laughed. “We’ll have a response up by tonight.”

“I hate to ask you to stay late,” Pepper said, frowning. 

Lakeisha shrugged. “It can’t wait,” she said. “This stuff can’t go unanswered.” Dorothea nodded solemnly, in agreement.

 

 

 

Steve was right, Tony was brooding. Pepper walked into the lab, where he had something metal disassembled across a workbench— she recoiled slightly when she saw the hand. It was Barnes’ arm. 

 AC/DC of some vintage, probably High Voltage (Pepper had an encyclopedic knowledge of the roots of metal, as it happened; it was far from the worst side-effect of years of Tony-wrangling) was cranked to earsplitting levels, and she gestured the volume down gradually. It took him a while to notice, but he finally whipped his head around and looked at her. He visibly relaxed when he saw that it was her. 

“Hey,” he said. 

“Hey,” she said. She walked into his space. He didn’t turn to embrace her or offer her a kiss, just turned back to his work, picked up a small piece between thumb and forefinger, and offered it to her. 

She took it, a small metal thing, a machined component probably from a servo motor. She turned it over in her fingers, and saw the tiny logo stamped on it. She blinked. It was Stark Industries’ logo, but the old version, before the redesign under Stane’s stewardship. 

She looked from it to the disassembled arm— it wasn’t the whole arm, didn’t seem like enough metal, and she wondered where the shoulder was, with the red star— and then met Tony’s eyes. 

“Oh my God,” she said. This was precisely what Steve had been inarticulately upset about. Her heart pinched, a little; surely Steve must be so, so angry, to know that Stark Inc. had played a part in what had happened to his friend, and yet, one of his first reactions had been to be concerned for what the revelation would to do Tony. It couldn’t be clearer that he didn’t hold Tony responsible at all. 

“The Winter Soldier’s arm is, at least in part, Stark tech,” Tony said quietly. He sounded defeated. 

“Oh Tony,” she breathed. 

“I don’t know where he hid the files,” Tony said. “There’s nothing like it in any of the projects of his I’ve found over the years. There’s insanely cutting-edge stuff in this arm. I mean, twenty years ahead of anything else out there in the prosthetics or robotics market. And I know what’s out there, in the robotics market. You know? I kind of invented the market as it is currently.”

“I know you did,” she said. He recognized the obvious sop to his ego, acknowledged it with a tiny movement of the corner of his mouth, went back to being subdued and quiet. 

“Apparently Howard stopped by a few times,” Tony said. “Had conversations in front of, but not with, the Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier understood a great deal more of what was said in front of him than anyone realized, and retained an awful lot of it. We knew that, and it’s done us a lot of good these last few months. So I’m disinclined to dismiss his memory of Howard talking about his son Anthony as any sort of confusion.”

Pepper nodded slowly, closed her eyes for a moment. That was clear and damning; Howard had been middle-aged when Tony was born, but young when Bucky was lost. When she opened them, Tony was staring at the still-articulated palm of the hand, fingers curled upward, lying in the middle of the workbench. “And we all know how obsessed Howard was with all things Captain America. There is no possible way he didn’t recognize Bucky.”

“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Pepper said, not quite a platitude but gentle nonetheless. 

“And I can’t repair this,” Tony said, gesturing at the arm. “Not the way it is. The leak from the exhausted power source corroded some of the components into nothingness, I can’t reconstruct what was there. The schematics I have don’t cover it. The maintenance manuals I’ve managed to recover don’t cover it. Not to the level of detail I need.” He shook his head. “I need Howard’s files.”

“Could you make something else instead?” Pepper asked, frowning. She couldn’t believe that even this sophisticated a robotic construct would be beyond Tony. 

“I could,” Tony said. “It’s a possibility. But I don’t really understand the neural hookups he has, and I’m really reluctant to go poking around in his spine and his brain, which is where they are.”

“Do you have to alter the hookups?” Pepper asked. 

“I think I do,” Tony said. “That’s the thing. I mean, I could make any old kind of anything to replace the arm, if I just take the whole thing off and start over. But to give him the force-feedback, the fine motor control, the sensitivity, that’s all on the neural hookups. And I understand them well enough to know that they don’t work very well.”

“I know you’ll figure it out,” Pepper said. “It’s what you do. As for the rest, well. There are a lot of conversations that’ll have to happen. I don’t think there are any hidden archives in any of the Stark facilities where Howard would have worked, but I can see if I can’t put someone on hunting for that.”

Tony shook his head slowly. “I don’t think you’d find anything,” he said grimly. “He hid the schematics for an element in the layout of the buildings of the Stark Expo and the explanation in the offcut footage from a commercial. If there had been secret filing cabinets he would probably have told me where they were in a wiring diagram or something.”

“Maybe we just haven’t found them,” Pepper said. 

“If Howard was HYDRA,” Tony said, “there won’t be secret fucking filing cabinets.”

Pepper closed her eyes. “Tony,” she said quietly. 

Tony was gazing steadily at her when she opened them again. “If Howard was HYDRA,” he said, “then I have an awful lot of work to do.”

 

* * * 

 

It took about six occurrences of Bucky waking in a total panic for them to catch on and put him in a room that didn’t look like a lab or hospital. Waking to medium-blue walls and a window with curtains usually gave him enough pause for his mind to catch up before the pain took him, and he could at least refrain from breaking quite so many things. 

He didn’t know how many days it had been, but at some point they’d come up with a painkiller that actually worked on him, somehow, and it had made everything so much better that he didn’t really care. He slept, then, real sleep, for longer than he had in, well, longer than he could remember, and when he woke up Steve was sitting there drawing, and it threw him into deja vu so profound he wasn’t sure what was even real. 

“Steve?” he said. 

Steve looked over at him, smiled absently, then sat up a little and frowned. “Buck?”

“I think it’s me,” Bucky said, blinking at the ceiling. He looked at Steve again. “Is it?”

“I think so,” Steve said, and he was laughing, but in that kind of way that suggested he’d been worried. “How do you feel?”

“Amazing,” Bucky said. He was rewarded with an eyebrow quirk. 

“Really?” Steve didn’t look convinced. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “I mean, it’s not like I can move or anything, but nothing hurts. I mean _nothing_. I don’t even know the last time literally nothing hurt.”

Steve’s face clouded a little. “What, just, all the time?” he asked. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and lay there completely relaxed for a few moments. “How long have I been out?”

“Three days,” Steve said, “give or take. They said that you don’t have any organ damage and you’re healing well.”

Bucky considered that, looking at the ceiling. He thought about the last thing he remembered, which was Steve holding him and Tony looking weirdly apologetic and the doctor in her cardigan with her brooch. That made him smile: he remembered. He thought about holding a gun to his own head, remembered— “Natasha,” he said, shoving up onto his elbow. Pain poked dimly through his shoulder and he grimaced and lay back down. 

“She’s out of surgery and recovering well,” Steve said. “As is Clint, he was less-seriously injured.”

Bucky breathed for a moment, letting the weirdly-muffled pain lapse back down to fuzzy almost-nothingness. It felt weirdly luxurious to have all these memories that connected coherently. He remembered Natasha’s mouth, her naked breasts, her wicked smile, and remembered the diner, remembered their conversation. Remembered giving Steve a hard time, remembered all of it. 

“You look pleased,” Steve said, smiling. 

“I remember things,” Bucky said. “And— nothing _hurts_.” Nothing, not the ache he’d stopped noticing in his back, not the pain he’d ignored in his jaw, not the ceaseless harsh neural static of his arm, not the pain he’d been nursing in his gut since the bullet last year. It was all still there, it just didn’t bother him, which he hadn’t realized would feel so different from the way he normally gritted his teeth through it, shoved it away, and didn’t _let_ it bother him.

Steve went sort of oddly tight-faced. “And really, in all those years, they never once gave you anything for pain?”

“Why would they?” Bucky asked, frowning in confusion. “You don’t actually need to, if you immobilize someone well enough.”

“The part that’s upsetting isn’t that you’d say that,” Steve said after a long moment, “but that you seem so genuinely baffled.”

Bucky thought about that. “I guess that’s… fucked-up,” he said. “Is it?” He shook his head. It was the most indifferent he’d ever been, which was saying a lot, as he’d been pretty indifferent to a whole lot of shit for a very long time. 

“Yes,” Steve said, “that’s fucked-up,” and Bucky realized abruptly that Steve was near tears. 

“Don’t,” Bucky said, alarmed, “don’t do— don’t—“ 

“If I’d _known_ ,” Steve said, and he was crying now, and that was just bad wrong in every possible way, “if I’d known, I’d never have _left you_ —“ 

“Don’t,” Bucky said, almost frantic, grabbing Steve’s hand, “don’t do that,” and he scrabbled at Steve’s arm until Steve came down and put his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck and embraced him. Bucky wound his arm around Steve’s shoulders and hung on. 

“Just let me cry it out for a minute,” Steve groused, with a half-laugh half-sob. “I never knew it would be so hard to not have you around. I never— okay, maybe I did know that. I knew it would be hard and I didn’t want to.”

“You do what you gotta do, Steve,” Bucky said, closing his eyes and listening to Steve’s heartbeat. It didn’t stutter anymore, didn’t hiccup, didn’t flutter, it just worked, steady and reliable and strong. He wrapped his fingers around the back of Steve’s neck. “You fuckin’ meatball, I left you alone for like, a _day_ , and you crashed a fuckin’ plane into the goddamn Arctic, what the hell is wrong with you?”

Steve laughed, and he was still crying. “I didn’t know what else to do, Buck,” he said. 

Bucky noticed he was crying too, which was just about typical, so he hung on and they cried on each other for a while. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, and it was weird, then, because he could remember a bunch of other times, like a whole constellation of the same thing— like that time his dad had beat the shit out of him and he’d yelled at Steve for fussing at him and Steve had yelled back until Bucky started crying and they’d both just hung onto each other and cried like babies — like that time they’d found out Steve’s mom had tuberculosis for sure and it was a death sentence — like right after Bucky’s dad had gotten killed and Bucky hadn’t known what to do except maybe try to drink himself to death but Steve hadn’t let him — and it was overwhelming, it was a crushing weight of history, and Bucky hung on and choked on it but managed not to drown. 

Eventually the crying stopped, and Bucky realized Steve had fallen asleep. “Aw jeez,” he muttered. He knew from the Howling Commando days that new-Steve could go days without sleep; this kind of thing generally meant he’d already done so. He’d probably been keeping a vigil by Bucky’s bed, which was dumb but was only exactly the same thing Bucky had done for him about a hundred thousand times, so he couldn’t really complain. 

“Steve,” he said softly, and kissed the side of Steve’s head unthinkingly, as he’d done so many times. “Hey.” 

Steve took in a deep breath through his nose. “Mm,” he said. 

Bucky kissed him again, this time deliberately, a soft press of lips to his temple. “Steve, I’m fuckin’ fine, will you get some real sleep and not on me?”

Steve pulled back enough to smile crookedly, sleepily at him. “I just missed you so goddamn much,” he said.

Bucky traced his fingers down the side of Steve’s face. Steve was the whole world, always had been. “I didn’t miss you,” he said dryly. “I didn’t miss anything.” 

“Jerk,” Steve said, but didn’t pull away. 

“Is he awake or what?” Stark asked from the door, and Steve didn’t startle— he’d known he was there, then, and hadn’t cared. Bucky let his hand fall anyway. “Oh,” Stark said, as Steve turned to look at him. “Were you guys making out? I didn’t mean to interrupt that.”

“You’d’ve just stood there and watched if we were,” Steve said, salty as anything.

“I,” Stark said, “well, maybe. I mean, I’m not saying I’m into that but I’m not saying I’m not either.” He came into the room, and Steve sat back. “So um. Are we coherent today?”

“I don’t know about _you_ ,” Bucky said, taking his cue from Steve’s saltiness and what he remembered of this guy who had so noisily and emphatically _not_ enjoyed hurting him, “you haven’t shown any sign yet, but _I_ am. Steve’s not makin’ a whole lotta sense though.”

“Then if there’s any informed consent to be given I’ll be sure you’re the one I ask,” Stark said, amused. “Listen, I’ve kind of been waiting to talk to you about this because the thing is, we sorta left you in a real bad state and we can definitely fix you but we figure we should probably ask you what you want done first.”

Bucky frowned at him, then at Steve. “What I want done?” 

“Your arm,” Tony said. “I can’t put it back the way it was, it’s broken. I could make a new one really similar to the old one, but I can’t do it exactly the same way it was because the way it was, it was really really stupid, and also some parts of you are broken and can’t be put back that way.”

Bucky thought about that a moment, remembered the displaced fracture, remembered the burning that had crawled up from his arm into his body, remembered the blood leaking from the armor plates. “Yeah I remember getting pretty fucked-up,” he said. 

“Yeah,” Stark said. He came farther into the room, stopped about level with Bucky’s waist, across the bed from Steve. He had a tablet— thing— computer? — about the size of a composition notebook, maybe a little smaller. He turned it so it faced Bucky and Steve. It was lit up with a diagram that sort of looked like an X-ray, and Bucky recognized his own torso, with the missing arm and bits of metal here and there. “So here’s the thing. You’re augmented similarly to Cap here, with the metabolism and advanced healing and so on, but not… kind of not as well, you’ve got some shortcomings and some really annoying metabolic habits like being totally resistant to painkillers and completely fucking terrible at digesting actual food, we’re probably going to have to put you on vitamin supplements for the rest of your unnatural but probably quite long life. But the thing is, even properly nourished, your bones can only heal so fast, and they definitely can’t support the weight and strain of a prosthetic like you had. Even though the thing was like half-vibranium, and how they did that I swear to God I don’t know, I thought I had almost all of it.”

“They had to graft metal on my bones a lot,” Bucky said quietly. “I watched them do it a bunch.”

Steve and Stark both stared at him. “Jesus,” Steve said, sudden and hard like someone had kicked him. Stark was just staring blankly. 

“It wasn’t that bad,” Bucky said. “I mean, you guys can probably find a sedative that works on me. But if you can’t, it really wasn’t that bad.”

“I am not,” Stark said faintly, “cutting you open while you’re conscious.”

“You might not have any choice,” Bucky said. “It’s fine, it’s not like I haven’t done it a whole bunch of times. It usually worked out fine because the first thing I’d get back was my vocal chords, and my jaw, so they could tell by the screaming how long they had left and if they had to give me another dose so they could finish.” He gestured toward his mouth. “Good bite guard works wonders to keep the noise down. Although,” he brightened, “the shit I’m on right now, nothing really hurts, if I had that too I probably wouldn’t even scream. I’d just tell you if it was wearing off. That wouldn’t really be bad at all. ‘Specially if you don’t make me watch.”

“Oh my God,” Stark said, blinking slowly. He snapped to attention, dark eyes focusing razor-sharp on Bucky, and shook his head abruptly. “No, we’re finding something that puts you under because we’re not fucking _animals_.”

Bucky tilted his head, the closest he could come to a shrug. “If it makes you feel better,” he said. 

“Hoo boy,” Stark said. 

 

The upshot was that Tony and the doctors he was working with wanted to remove several large sections of bone that were just rotten with microfractures, take out the hack jobs of metal reinforcements, and replace them with well-designed, more sophisticated reinforcements. He had some crazy polymer stuff that he seemed kind of excited about, that would be more elastic and wouldn’t cause stress fractures in the remaining bone.

 He wanted to remove almost all that was left of Bucky’s human left arm and replace the whole thing with a much better-supported, better-engineered prosthetic, that would look and act just about the same as the old one, but be vastly superior in terms of shock absorption, strength, dexterity, and neural feedback (although Tony confessed that he hadn’t one hundred percent worked out the neural feedback stuff, but he was confident they’d have it ironed out before Bucky was healed enough for surgery anyway). It also would be easily upgradeable in future, and would have a few Iron Man-like augmentations, including user-controllable communication features and a few other extras. And it would be powered off bioenergy from his body, so there would be no question of a dying power source leaving him injured or non-functional.

And, it would have a modular socket with all the hookups integrated in such a way that it could be removed for maintenance, or replaced entirely, without even a skilled technician. Bucky would be able to take it off himself, if he had to.

Steve had the tablet and was looking it over after Tony left, but Bucky was just dozing. Eventually Steve noticed he’d checked out of the conversation. 

“Don’t you think this is cool?” Steve asked. 

Bucky did his shrug-substitute head tilt again. “I don’t have much of an opinion,” he said. 

“Why not?” Steve looked horrified and sort of mad, which wasn’t really what Bucky had expected. 

Bucky just stared at him. “It’s all pretty much the same to me,” he said. “I mean, if I get a say, I’ll just ask that it not hurt so much. But other than that, it’s up to whoever’s in charge, you probably.”

“ _You_ ,” Steve said. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Whoever’s in charge of me. Whatever they want me to be able to do, I should be able to do.”

“ _You’re_ in charge of you,” Steve said. 

Bucky stared at him. “That’s fuckin’ stupid,” he said. “I can’t be in charge of me. I don’t even got two brain cells to rub together, you can’t put some souped-up killing machine arm on me and turn me loose. I wouldn’t trust me with a can opener, let alone some thing with, what the fuck was that, repulsors? Like I need fucking repulsors, or goddamn shock absorbers, Jesus. Gimme whatever the arm version of a peg leg is and put me in a padded room so I don’t fuckin’ _hurt_ anybody.”

Steve was staring at him like there was something wrong. “Is that what you want?” 

Bucky stared at him right back. “It’s not a question of want, Steve, it’s a question of being reasonable. I’ve killed, like, _a hundred people_.”

“Yes, because you were under the control of evil men,” Steve said. “So that’s why there shouldn’t be anyone in charge of you. Because on your own you wouldn’t do that kind of thing.”

Bucky made a show of looking around the room. “I was on my own this last, mm, most of a year,” he said, “and I’m pretty sure I doubled my body count in that time.”

“That’s different,” Steve said, “they were enemy agents. If we’re going to condemn people for that, I’ve got a pretty hefty total myself, and all entirely of my own free will.”

“It wasn’t all enemy agents,” Bucky said. Steve stared at him, mouth dropping open slightly. “Or, well…” He bit his lip. “Some of it might not have been real but there were at least a couple times I freaked out and people got hurt.”

Steve didn’t look as horrified as he really ought to have, and Bucky wondered if he’d understood at all. “Buck,” he said, “I’m not saying we have no work to do here, and I’m not saying we’re going to unleash you on the world just yet, but I am saying, you should feel like you can take charge of your own destiny and make plans for the future.”

“And I’m saying there’s no way there won’t be consequences for all the things I’ve done,” Bucky said, “so I’m not going to get too involved in planning for the future until I know what they are.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so mean to Tony. Sorry. I don't hate Tony, I swear. I actually screwed up the future plot with this, but I have a plan. It just means I have to rewrite like half of the rest of what I'd already written on this. Which is fine, it'll be better this way. Why is this my writing process? I don't know. I don't do outlines, I just write the story and then throw it out and start over. Why not!
> 
> I'm so bad at correspondence, and replying to comments, and things. I am actually going through a really tough time with communication in general (at this very moment I am working myself up to reply innocuously to an innocuous text from my own mother, who I have an excellent relationship, if that gives any context), and am sublimating all that by writing more. Which is a roundabout way of saying, I love, love every scrap of feedback, every kudos and reblog and comment and review and rec-- every single instance of it is so wonderful and I clutch it to my bosom and roll around with it. But I absolutely fucking suck at replying to these things, and I swear, I am working on it, and don't ever be embarrassed that you might have said something silly because I'm the worst commenter and if I leave a two-word squee comment on someone's fic it probably took me an hour, so I really, I really, I really appreciate every word no matter what it is.   
> [It's so stupid; I can write an entire 4,000-word story in 4 hours. But I can't write back to a Facebook message from a beloved friend asking how I'm doing, even though I want to and have the words in my head to do it. It's, well, it's stupid.]  
> So anyway. I love everyone in this bar. I'll fix this note later to be about the story. And I'll get through my comment replies. (I enjoy writing them! I just... can't? It's bizarre. This is not how depression works in the movies.)


	3. Never Asked Anything Of You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky proves to be a very unnerving houseguest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a little bit of payoff in the form of some not-particularly-explicit (sorry! I'm sure there'll be some, ahem, juicier scenes at some point but I'm not sure when) Sam/Steve towards the end of the chapter. But mostly it's discussion of how fucked-up Bucky is. Nothing particularly graphic, I hope, but there are some mentions of violence. Discussions of past Steve/Bucky, but any sex mentioned is consensual.

 

Bucky managed to get out of bed and make his unsteady way down the hall to the bathroom on his own. Just the broken bones he had shouldn’t have him this fucked-up, but he’d paged further through the tablet Steve had left and had read his own medical chart, and yeah okay. The power supply in his arm had poisoned him pretty bad, another few hours and he’d’ve had irreversible organ damage. So probably, he was justified in feeling kind of shaky at the moment, even apart from the way pain still managed to bleed through the medication if he moved unwarily. Or, sometimes, for no reason at all— and he knew that was the neural receivers, and that was only going to get worse.

He was in some sort of apartment. Something about the furnishings of the bathroom made him think maybe it was Steve’s, though there were no personal effects he recognized— just, the way things were put away carefully, the colors of the towels, the way the place was decorated. He turned the other way and looked into the other rooms in the hallway. One had a desk in it, with a computer on it, and a full bookshelf, and a neatly made bed with a duffel bag sitting next to it— a guest was staying there too, for sure. The next had a drawing table, an easel, and art books. Definitely Steve’s, and he stood a moment struck by it— this was how Steve lived, free to choose, and with enough money that he could have whatever he wanted. He had a whole room for art, with drawers full of supplies, and racks where in-progress paintings were stowed neatly. 

The fourth bedroom he peered into was really a bedroom, and he knew from the smell of it that it was Steve’s. Just, something about it— it mostly smelled of laundry and books, but the bed and the clothes and everything held a faint odor that smelled like Steve’s skin. His transformation had changed his scent slightly, but not much— it wasn’t something Bucky felt like he’d have noticed before his own far less positive transformation. Because it was clear, now, of course, that after the 107th had been captured, the torture they’d put him through, with the needles and the cigarette burns and the screaming, had been partly to test new formulae for the knockoff Super Soldier serum.

So maybe it was that he’d only ever smelled new-Steve with his own new nose, but he didn’t think so. Steve’s body chemistry was different, so it stood to reason his scent had changed. It was still recognizable, and still viscerally comforting. 

He turned away from the bedroom before he did something embarrassing like rolling around on the bed. He knew Steve was out, he’d said he had to go to a meeting, which was probably about Bucky. 

He wandered down the hall toward the main area. He had no memory of being brought into this place, like so many other places, but at least he had the physical liberty to explore these surroundings. He was a little edgy with a fear of being discovered and punished for wandering, but he kept pushing it away with his rational mind. 

There was a small sound from the open area at the end of the hallway, and he moved cautiously; the apartment was occupied, then. Steve hadn’t left him unattended. A page being turned, someone chewing something. He edged down the hallway, bare feet silent on the carpeted floor. Open plan apartment, a large space with one wall of windows, a living room on one side and the kitchen and dining area on the other— he stalked from one side of the hallway to the other, trying to find an angle that let him see the room’s occupant. 

It wasn’t a completely clear sight line but there was a man— probably a man— in one of the chairs by the window, legs ending with sneakers, skin dark, reading a magazine, bowl next to one hand with— grapes? Grapes. 

“Bucky?” the man said. “You awake?” 

Couldn’t have heard him just now, but must have heard him moving around earlier, Steve’s bedroom door had creaked. Probably had been waiting to hear the bedroom door shut again. Out of habit Bucky checked the set of his knife before moving, only it wasn’t there, of course it wasn’t there, and he had no arm, and he was completely helpless and he didn’t know this person. His heart rate kicked up before he could think it through any more than that, and now the man was moving, coming to check on him—

He stepped out into the living room, mastering himself, and the man startled— the man with the wings, the Falcon, Sam, in a gray sweatshirt and a pair of shorts, completely casual, no visible weapons. 

“Whoa, hey. Were you lurking?” the man asked. 

“Didn’t know who you were,” Bucky made himself answer, heart still in his throat. He was too weak to fight off an attack, and unarmed, and literally unarmed, and this man was Steve’s friend and would not attack him. This man was the one who had made the doctor take off her coat; that made him a threat because he was perceptive and would notice Bucky’s state, but not a threat because he was— 

Well, he was _kind_ , Bucky’s old mind supplied, and his new mind countered with the jumbled memories of almost every kindness he had encountered since the change, and every one of them had been false, every one a trap, every one a lure to get him to expose himself so they could break him further.

“Oh, fair enough,” the man said. “I was gonna check in with you when I showed up but Steve said you were out cold, so it seemed rude to bug you.” He stepped forward, shoulders angled nonthreateningly, and offered his right hand, eyebrows up, soft smile, non-aggressive. “I’m Sam Wilson, we kinda met before but circumstances were pretty weird, huh?”

Shaking hands. Bucky remembered that. He caught a steadying breath and put his own hand out, unable not to look warily up as he clasped the other man’s hand. “Bucky… Barnes,” he said, and it didn’t sound right, it sounded phony and weird, and came out sounding more like a question by the time he was done. 

Sam laughed, and Bucky controlled his reaction and kept his expression neutral. Laughter was something to be wary of; it was a noise men made when they were cruel for an audience. Wilson’s hand was warm and dry, and pressed firmly against Bucky’s before he let go and stepped back, still telegraphing non-confrontation with every body language signal. “You’re not used to sayin’ that at all, are you?”

“No,” Bucky said, pulling his hand back, putting his back to the wall. He’d been attacked by people who were signaling non-confrontation before; he’d faced some very good people. Usually something gave them away but that was the thing, up until something gave them away, there was no sign. That was how this worked. “It’s— I’m not used to anything except, well—“

“People hurting you,” Sam said. 

Bucky tilted his head a little. “Sort of,” he said. He’d scoped out the space in his peripheral vision. The apartment’s main door was to the left, past the kitchen— tiled entryway, tiled kitchen floor giving way to hardwood in the living room with a carpeted nook for the entertainment center, a few plants by the floor-to-ceiling windows, big television and stereo, comfortable-looking couches in a configuration like Steve entertained a few people kind of often. From the windows it seemed they were pretty high up, no viable escape that way, though some of them looked like they could be opened. 

“How you feelin’?” Sam asked. “You’ve kinda been in and out the last couple days, had Steve pretty worried.”

“Fuzzy,” Bucky said, “I feel fuzzy.” That was the truth. The conflicting alarm bells going off in his mind were all muted and distant, but the no less alarming for being poorly-perceived.

“In a good way or a bad way?” Sam asked, tilting his head. His body language was very inviting, very friendly, very non-confrontational, and Bucky could barely look at him for the suspense of wondering when it would change. It always changed. Nobody looked like that around him and was genuine unless they had some kind of real trump card, like knowing all his access codes or having a gun trained on him or— 

Well, it stood to reason the whole building was wired. “Bad way,” Bucky said, remembering conversation, remembering that you had to answer people, and he was trying, through the fog of drugs, to look like he wasn’t scanning the corners of the room for where the cameras must be, where the guns probably were. He had told them, after all, what drugs to use to manage him. And they were within their rights to do so, he just, he wanted to know where the darts would come from, it made it easier to make sure they didn’t stick anywhere particularly painful. He usually tried to catch them in the shoulder or thigh, they hurt less there, wore off less unevenly. 

“You look like you think someone’s about to punch you,” Sam said. “C’mon, sit down, I won’t bite.”

“Sure,” Bucky said, totally failing to be nonchalant. He wasn’t in a mental place where he could be very good at this. His body was damaged, his mind impaired, and he wanted to curl up in a corner and hiss at people, or maybe cry, until the fuzzy-headed feeling went away. 

There was nowhere to sit where his back wasn’t to something threatening, either the window or the door, and he still couldn’t tell where the guns were. They had to be built-in, so probably mounted in fixtures, light fixtures maybe, or the seam of the ceiling— ventilation duct, that looked big enough for a person to fit through. He reluctantly sat with his back to the window. 

“You can’t look everywhere at once,” Sam said, and offered him the bowl of grapes. “Hey, you hungry? There’s all kinds of food in this place. Make you a sandwich?”

“Yeah,” he said, more out of not knowing how else to answer than out of any desire for food. Short of getting on a ladder, he couldn’t tell what was hidden in that light fixture. There was at least a camera in the corner, built in right where the ceiling and two walls met, it kind of gleamed a little. But it didn’t look big enough to have a gun in it. 

They couldn’t be expecting this man to be able to put him down if he had to. Sam got up, easy and graceful, athletic and built like a fighter— Bucky remembered him, remembered he was a good shot, remembered he had solid tactical sense, remembered he’d gotten the jump on Bucky once by virtue of being unexpectedly airborne. But he also remembered pretty handily overpowering the man in hand-to-hand combat, and definitely remembered kicking him off a helicarrier. 

He seemed at home in the kitchen, obviously spent a lot of time here, knew where everything was. Bucky unsuccessfully fought with himself to sit normally, finally giving up and letting himself pull his legs up and curl into the corner of the chair. He didn’t know where the darts would come from, and he wouldn’t be able to react quickly when they did. The drugs were still making him hazy, even though they were starting to wear off and the pain was bleeding through as a dull red haze with sharp spikes.

“So you took a bullet for Natasha,” Sam said, putting something back into the fridge. “I just don’t know if I’d have the guts to do that, man. First off how’d you see it coming, and second off what made you do that?”

“I d-don’t know,” Bucky said, which wasn’t at all true but was the only thing he could make his mouth do. 

Sam frowned at him from across the space. “You cold, man? Lemme get you a sweater.”

“Fine,” Bucky said. “I’m fine.” It wasn’t cold. Well, he _was_ cold, but he was always cold.

Sam came over with a plate in one hand and a glass of water in the other, and set them on the coffee table. “Sure you’re not cold?” He frowned, and sat down in the chair next to him. “The walls aren’t gonna close in on you,” he said. 

Bucky shook with the effort of trying to speak, trying to say something nonchalant, trying to act normal enough that whoever’s finger was on the trigger didn’t flag him as about to snap. “I know,” he said finally. It would have to be darts, it couldn’t be gas, the man was in here with him. “They don’t— they don’t move.”

“Is it me making you nervous?” Sam asked. “I know you don’t know me all that well, and for casual acquaintances we’ve kind of shot at one another a lot, but I promise, I don’t have any ulterior motive here, I’m just killin’ time until Steve gets back.”

“I know you don’t,” Bucky said with difficulty. It had to be the light fixture, but he couldn’t see how. Maybe a panel slid or something, but that kind of thing added crucial fractions of seconds to response time, and the thing with working with augmented humans is that fractions of seconds were plenty of time for a lot of things to happen. 

“Can we talk about something that won’t make you any more wound-up than you are?” Sam asked. “Or you can tell me what’s got you so on-edge and I can help you figure out if it’s something you really ought to worry about or if it’s actually gonna be okay.”

Bucky tore his gaze away from the corner of the room and made himself look at Sam, who was still all casual non-aggression, unthreatening, relaxed. His face was gentle concern. Nobody looked at the Winter Soldier like that, not without some sort of reassurance. He couldn’t possibly think that injury and drugs and lack of weapons were really enough to neutralize a threat like this. 

“I’m not,” Bucky tried, but his jaw was too tight to move easily, to speak clearly. “I’m not on edge. I’m okay. I’m not—“ He certainly was doing a bad job at looking normal, and his guts clenched; if he freaked out, he didn’t know where the darts were. 

“Okay,” Sam said slowly. “Sure you’re not. So listen, you and Steve, you go way back, right? You probably have all kinds of real embarrassing stories about him from when he was too young to know better. You know that’s partly how Natasha convinced Stark to go help you out, right? She told him you were a goldmine of incriminating material about Steve’s days of yore.”

It was a pretty transparent ploy to distract him, but it was something, and Bucky latched on to the man’s voice as something to keep him from getting agitated enough for the observers to shut him down. “Yeah,” he said. “I got all the dirt.”

“Steve talks about you all the time,” Sam said. “I mean… I was with him while we were trying to track you down, and we didn’t do a whole lot of talkin’, it was kind of a grim trip, but what little he did say was all about you and it was all good stuff. So, I mean, if you’re worried because we’ve all read your file, you should know we’ve also all heard about a hundred hours of stories about what a great dude you are.”

“Were,” Bucky said, before he could think better of it. Controlling his breathing helped him get his heart rate a little bit under control. It wasn’t much but he could keep the visible shivering down. “Was. Great dude I was. Not that guy now.”

“Well,” Sam said. “I mean. There’s not an expiration date on that. Thing is, you know, I feel like I know Steve Rogers pretty well? And he actually has a pretty clear eye when it comes to people, most of the time. He knows what’s up.” 

“Steve Rogers,” Bucky said, but that was as far as he could get. Breathing. Out. Then in. Yes. Okay. Acceptance. Calm. 

“He told me the story of the first time you guys met,” Sam said, “and you know, it was a really good story, and actually told me an awful lot about you.” 

“Did it,” Bucky said. He thought about that a moment— oh, that was a good distraction, remembering a dusty alleyway and some bricks. “He was getting the shit kicked outta him.”

“That’s how he tells it,” Sam agreed, smiling easily. “He says he was maybe ten or eleven, and these three bigger boys were just beatin’ the hell out of him, and outta nowhere this kid he doesn’t know shows up and just plows through the three other boys, puts them all down on the ground.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Danny fuckin’ Collins, he was a dick to me from day one, I musta busted his face like five times before he moved away. What a palooka.”

“So Steve scrapes himself up off the ground,” Sam says, “the way he tells it, and his pride’s wounded and he’s a dumb little shit, so he yells at you that he was doing fine on his own and didn’t need your help.”

Bucky exhaled, something that might have been a laugh in another life, and it took some of the screaming tension out of his neck. “Yeah,” he said, “I remember that. Little punk.”

“But this is the part that sticks with me,” Sam said. “He said your reaction to that was just to shrug and say I know, you were doin’ fine, I just hate that guy so much I wanted a chance to hit him.” 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, half-smiling. “It was the truth though, I would’ve done that for anybody just for the chance to plant a good one on Danny Collins’s jaw. He was such an asshole, you don’t even know, man.”

“It was just such a gentle thing to say,” Sam said. “You know? His whole life, people were dicks to Steve about being a scrawny little pipsqueak, and you just never were.”

“Nah, I wasn’t bein’ gentle,” Bucky said. “I was just tellin’ the truth.” 

“But you were always like that, he said,” Sam went on. “Never made him feel like he was less just because he was scrawny. Never made him feel like he owed you anything when you helped him out.”

“He wasn’t,” Bucky said. “He was never less than anybody. And it wasn’t all me helpin’ him out, he did plenty for me.” There was another camera, in the other corner, near the door, and it had some sort of apparatus, maybe a gun. He relaxed fractionally. It didn’t look like one, but then, he wasn’t an expert on technology. His phantom left hand sent pain stabbing up through the nonexistent arm and he grimaced; the neural receivers were getting a whole lot nastier already as the drugs wore off.

“Well, a lot of people treated him badly,” Sam said, “but you never did, and that meant a lot to him.”

“He got me in all kinds of trouble,” Bucky said, uncurling a little. If that’s where the darts were, he could pretty easily protect his face at least. The motion made his broken bones twinge fiercely. “I miss those kinds of trouble, though.”

“What kinds of trouble?” Sam asked. “Fun kinds?”

“Ah,” Bucky said, “mostly starting fights I had to finish whether I wanted to or not, because it was that or let him get killed. I got my ass beat pretty bad a time or two.” He slid a look over at Sam. “Or ten.”

Sam laughed right out loud, a pure and joyous sound, and clapped his hands as he rocked his body in amusement. It was a different kind of laughter than Bucky was used to. There was no edge to it, it lapped around Bucky and didn’t cut at him. “See, that,” Sam said. “That right there. _That_ is what we want. Because to hear Steve tell it, he never started any of these fights, they just sort of, of _happened_ to him, and you were like this guardian angel. But we always kinda wondered, were there really that many jerks just wandering around New York lookin’ to start shit with little guys?” 

“Oh my God,” Bucky said, uncurling a little more. “No, I swear to God, even before he was a super soldier he had this uncanny ability to just… sense… where there was a guy or maybe several guys, frequently bigger than me, who held opinions contrary to his and who liked to discuss these things by means of crude physical violence.” He rolled his eyes. “Sometimes it was like having a really aggressive little dog. Slightly less humping of things, though.”

“Oh man,” Sam said, laughing; it was just _such_ a long time since anyone had laughed like that in Bucky’s presence. “Oh that is priceless. You, man, you’ve earned your keep already, just with that mental image.”

Bucky looked at the knuckles of his right hand. He remembered they’d used to be a little scarred, a little beat-up from fighting. Now there were scars he didn’t recognize. “Used to have a mean left hook,” he mused. “Usually led with the right, they always bought it, I wouldn’t even try to connect, I’d just clock ‘em with the left. It worked like, every single time. Won me a lot of fights I had no right to.”

A vivid, visceral sense-memory came to him, then, of what it had felt like to put that metal fist through a human skull, and he shuddered all over, sucked in a breath, and dropped his right fist back down to wrap around his legs. 

“Aw you just went somewhere dark, didn’t you,” Sam said. 

“Not the same when it’s made of metal,” Bucky said. “Not— it goes right through their—” He shuddered. 

“Let’s go back,” Sam said, “to the mental image of Steve as a little dog humping things.”

Bucky shuddered once more. “Didn’t h-hump things much,” he said, pulling himself back into conversation with an effort. If the bird man noticed he’d started freaking out— he looked nervously over at the camera by the door, braced in dread. He hated it when they caught him by surprise. Sometimes they did, just came out of nowhere. 

“Steve wasn’t much of a humper,” Sam said. He was trying to draw Bucky along, ride through the awkwardness, get conversational momentum, keep Bucky distracted, but his body language was still good, still pleasant, still not braced for anything. 

“He was— I couldn’t judge him,” Bucky said, trying like hell to go along with it. He looked back and forth between the two cameras he could see, and the light fixture, which hadn’t moved, hadn’t changed. “I, the thing was, I was so bad about it, myself. Any fights I got in that weren’t about Steve and weren’t about family stuff were always about girls that I shouldn’t have been makin’ time with.”

“So Steve really was as pure and virginal as the driven snow, when he went into that ice,” Sam prompted.

“Wouldn’t say that p- pr-recisely,” Bucky said, _Christ, get it together_ , and he made himself look away from the cameras, look down at the floor, look submissive. “He, uh. He was a uh, a good kid, though. Not like me.”

“The history books all talk about how great you were,” Sam said, softly, kindly. “Hey. Hey, it’s okay. What’s over there that’s got you so freaked out?”

“Nothing,” Bucky said, shutting down, going as still as he could manage, “there’s nothing, it’s— nothing.” If he couldn’t manage _normal_ sometimes _submissive_ kept them from moving against him. Sometimes it was for no reason, though, because they needed to put him down to cut him open or do maintenance on him or something. He knew he needed more maintenance, they’d just— they’d said he needed a couple days to heal up, they weren’t gonna— not yet, they’d said— 

“Buddy,” Sam said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, man. I’m the only one here, nobody else is here, nobody’s watching.”

“Somebody’s always watching,” Bucky murmured, though microphones were so good nowadays that almost never worked anymore. 

“What would they be doing anyway?” Sam asked. “We’re just talkin’. You’re not doin’ anything wrong, what would they do to you?”

“Shut me down,” Bucky murmured, head ducked. The drugs were almost done wearing off— maybe he was burning through them— and the pain was cresting into vicious sucking waves. It wasn’t just the shoulder, of course, it was all the neural hookups in the missing arm; the dull prickling was slowly intensifying into stabbing feedback, looping up through his spine and stabbing hard enough to make his nonexistent fingers twitch. It was manageable now, but it wasn’t helping— as the drug-fog cleared, the pain was fogging him instead. He was a long way from fully operational and the knowledge had him gritting his teeth on the edge of panic.

“Hey,” Sam said, standing between him and the light fixture now, bending, but not looming, still conciliatory. “Hey. It’s okay. Nobody’s gonna shut you down.” He crouched, out of the way, Bucky wasn’t cornered, but it would be hard for them to get a clear shot at him with the darts. 

Eye contact. Bucky made himself raise his head, struggled to get his eyes up, finally managed to look at Sam, whose eyes were a warm brown, whose expression was soft and sympathetic and not at all frightened or wary. “You have to sometimes, though,” he said. “They have to— if I get out of control— there has to be— I just— I don’t like the darts.”

“Darts,” Sam said. 

“The ones they use to stop me,” Bucky said. 

“Darts like tranquilizer darts?” Sam asked, eyes going wide. “Are you fucking with me?”

“Not tranquilizers,” Bucky said. Looking at Sam’s face had gotten easier, and he studied him obliquely, ascertaining that this man genuinely had no idea where the cameras in this room were, had no particular plans to put him down. Even in the distress he was exhibiting now there was still no aggression, not even defensiveness. “But they ff- figured out the hard way that re-relying on the people in the, in the room with me to be able to—“ He gestured with his chin. “You know. Get off a shot if I went. Went off the handle— it was no good, they needed to put the dart guns in with the surveillance cameras.”

“If you went off the handle,” Sam repeated, visibly processing that.

“I killed a lot of handlers,” Bucky said. “And if they had guards in with me, I just, I killed guards and then—“ He tilted his head, grimaced. “Then I had guns. Even the dart guns, to everyone but me that stuff is, is pretty much deadly poison. So that was no good. Put the observers in another room, y’know, and give _them_ the guns, like remote controlled, there wasn’t anything I could do.” It sank in slowly, and he lifted his eyes past Sam’s shocked face to the cameras. “You telling me you don’t have— what’s your plan if I go nuts? You gonna, what, talk me down?”

Sam cut his eyes sideways. “Uh, pretty much?” 

Bucky stared at him. “You’re either crazy or plain stupid,” he said. “Or you think I’m really— really slowed down. The drugs are wearin’ off, man. I know I don’t have the killing machine arm but I still don’t fancy your chances.”

“Are you threatening me?” Sam asked, but he still wasn’t displaying any aggression, any fear or nervousness; he just looked unhappy. 

“ _No_ ,” Bucky said, upset and miserable. He wasn’t getting the point _at all_.

“Then eat your sandwich,” Sam said, gentle but emphatic, sitting down. “I made that with _love_ , bucko.” 

 

* * * 

 

“I don’t really care how much paperwork it’s generated,” Steve said, unable not to grin obnoxiously. “I’ll stay up all night doing paperwork. I’ll stay up all week doing paperwork. I really don’t care.”

“I know, I know,” Hill said, “it’s worth it. We’ve pretty much gutted what remained of HYDRA’s organized, effective force.” She sighed. “What’s left is deep underground now, is the thing.”

“But deep underground with no leadership,” Steve said, “and no money or equipment, and most importantly, no political clout.”

“It’s dangerous to assume,” Hill said. And she was doing the look Steve was only just getting to know her well enough to parse, the look where she was solemn and cool but slightly, slightly smiling on the inside. Which meant she was arguing, but not really arguing against him. 

“True,” Steve said. “This is true. And we need to go after them now, while we can still trace some of them back to their burrows. But. I kind of.” He rubbed the back of his neck. 

“You have another thing to worry about,” Hill filled in, and her expression softened minutely. Which was a lot, for her. “How’s he doing?”

Steve shrugged. “Better,” he said, “now that we’ve found drugs that work on him.”

“They said you were out for a while,” Hill said, “playing— guinea pig?”

“He already had so much going on that they didn’t want to test experimental drugs on him,” Steve said. “So I volunteered.” Hill stared at him. “His metabolism is even more screwed-up than mine. So, take for instance morphine? It’s effective on me in large doses for about five minutes. On him, not at all.”

“What’s the point of that?” Hill asked, blinking in what was for her a dramatic showing of dismay. 

“Means I can’t be poisoned, mostly, or gassed, or any of that. Same for him. We’re super-soldiers, remember?” Steve shrugged. “But it makes us tricky to treat when something finally does take us out.”

“Hadn’t really thought of that,” Hill said. 

Steve tilted his head. “It’s a pain,” he said. “Literally.” He shrugged. “But we found something that works, and I don’t have to watch him suffer anymore, so it’s all good now.”

“He got hurt pretty bad,” Hill said. “Does he have a healing factor like yours?”

Steve nodded. “More or less,” he said. “Rapid healing, but not instant. So he’s looking at a couple of weeks, really, before he’s back to normal. And even then, well. The arm won’t regenerate.” He fidgeted with his tablet. “Tony says they’re probably going to have to amputate more of what’s left, he’s had a lot of long-term damage there they just haven’t cared to fix.”

“How about, um,” Hill said, and gestured gingerly towards her head. 

Steve shrugged. “He was pretty lucid before,” he said. “Seems to have a pretty good handle on what’s going on.”

“That’s hopeful,” Hill said. 

“Yeah,” Steve said shyly. It was weird, how vulnerable it made him feel to talk about. He was used, he realized, to not really caring about anything on a personal level. It had been easy to figure out how to interact with people who only really saw him as Captain America when he hadn’t really had anything else going on in his life, to speak of. He didn’t know how to talk about personal things with these people. Natasha was the only one who’d ever tried, before, on anything but the most superficial and possibly-mocking level. “He’s, um. He’s been through a lot, but.” He shrugged awkwardly. 

Hill actually smiled at him, with a gentleness that looked sort of odd from her, but didn’t seem condescending at least. “I hope he’ll be okay,” she said. “He, ah. I always admired him, in the, in the histories.” She made— was it a nervous gesture? It might have been. “You know how everyone has a favorite Howling Commando?”

“No,” he said, giving her a surprised look. 

“Really?” Her nose sort of wrinkled in skepticism, and it was unexpectedly cute. Steve considered that a moment. Having a personal life made people reveal that they did too. “Well. Everyone does, Captain.” 

“Steve,” he corrected her absently. If he could talk about his personal life with someone, he could have a first name. 

“Steve,” she said, looking serious, then smiled. “Everyone has a favorite Howling Commando. And you can always tell a lot about somebody by who their favorite Howling Commando is.”

Steve shook his head slowly, incredulous. “Is that so,” he said. 

She nodded. “And my favorite was Bucky because… well, because he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, and he did what had to be done.”

“They all did,” Steve said, frowning a little. 

She shook her head. “When you simplify it down, to teach to children, as history, they each get distilled into snapshots, really. You wouldn’t understand because you know too much about them.” She smiled, and it was a kind expression. “Anyway. Bucky was probably the most romanticized of all of them, except you, because the others all lived.”

“Except,” Steve said, and had to stop, because the others were all dead, all of them. 

Hill caught that, and looked mortified. “I’m making it worse,” she said. 

He dredged up a smile for her. “No,” he said, “you’re fine.” He reached out and touched her arm. “Thanks,” he said, squeezing gently and letting go as he turned away. 

“Steve,” she said. 

He looked back, raising his eyebrows. 

“Don’t do any more paperwork tonight, hm?” She tilted her head at him. 

He looked down at the tablet in his hand. “There’s a lot to get through,” he said. 

“Take your time on it,” she said. “I’ll cover for you. You should be able to be there for your friend, not stuck slaving away over administrative bullshit.”

He laughed, and looked down again. “If you think I’ve even been that good,” he said, “that I’ve even _tried_ to slave away during any minute he’s been awake, you’ve got a much higher opinion of my dedication than is actually warranted.” 

For some reason, that made her smile wider and warmer than he’d ever seen, from her, and she tossed him a mock-salute as she turned to walk the other way down the hall.  

 

* * * 

 

Steve let himself in carefully, though JARVIS had informed him that Bucky wasn’t in the living room and wouldn’t be startled. Sam was sitting in the kitchen with a glass of whiskey in front of him, and he looked up as Steve came in. 

“That bad,” Steve said, seeing his face, taking in the tableau of the hunched shoulders and the liquor.

“Oh my God,” Sam said. “I’m glad booze still works on _me_.”

Steve dropped into the chair on the other side of the table. “What happened?” he asked, stomach twisting up in worry.

“He was good,” Sam said, “it’s not that, he didn’t hurt himself or me or anything. But Jesus. Just, the shit he said— the shit he expected me to do— I don’t know where to start, Steve.”

Steve chewed on his lip, and Sam pushed the tumbler over to him. He took a sip, enjoying the taste even if it didn’t quite have the same burn as it used to. “So I take it trying to draw him out about what he wants done for his arm didn’t go too well,” Steve said. 

“I don’t think I even brought it up,” Sam admitted, taking the tumbler back and knocking back the rest of the whiskey in it. He sighed. “He started off upset because he didn’t know where the dart guns were— right?” He caught Steve’s mystified expression and pointed at him. “Right? I was like, what the hell do you mean, and he’s wedged in the corner of the couch all curled up like a turtle and he’s like, well, the dart guns in the surveillance cameras, so they can shut me down remotely when I freak out.”

“Jesus,” Steve said, and wondered if he was going to wear out the sentiment. 

“So I try to explain to him that there are no dart guns and then he gets upset that there’s no plan to protect me from him,” Sam went on. “Like, really upset. And this is the thing, he was fine being alone in a room with you, he was more than fine being alone with Natasha in some damn close quarters from what I understand, but he thinks I’m gonna die instantly if he loses his temper? It’s enough to give a normal human guy a complex.”

“Well,” Steve said. “She did kick his ass in hand-to-hand.”

“He threw her through a car!” Sam said. “Dude I kicked him in the head at 75 miles per hour!”

“Yeah,” Steve said, “I’m, I don’t know either. He pretty much killed me, I don’t know why he doesn’t think that’d be a problem.”

“I’m not insulted,” Sam said, “I’m just fucking heartbroken. I’ve seen some shit, you know? But this is a whole other level. I don’t know what I can do for him.”

Steve looked at his hands, sucking on his lip, wanting to beg Sam not to give up on Bucky but it was kind of too much to ask of someone. “I, uh,” he said. 

“I know some people,” Sam said. “Some guys who’ve worked with POWs and torture victims and stuff. I don’t figure bringing them in would help, but I’m gonna at least consult with them, see if they got any insights. Because you can’t— I tend to try to relate things to normal everyday experience, right? And I just don’t think Bucky’s got the frame of reference to make that work.”

“He doesn’t think he’s a person,” Steve said miserably. “Like, he just doesn’t even think that’s something he _could_ think.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “It’s, it’s fucked-up.”

Steve stood up, went and looked in the fridge. “So here’s the part where I make it worse,” Steve said, rummaging and coming up with a Tupperware of leftover pasta. He threw the whole thing into the microwave and hit random buttons. 

“What,” Sam asked, staring at him in dread. 

“He was like that before,” Steve said, yanking viciously on a drawer handle to retrieve a fork, making himself set a plate down gently. “You want some of this?”

“Sure,” Sam said. “What?”

“I mean he was already fucked-up before he fell off the train,” Steve said, grabbing another fork and closing the drawer too forcefully. “He was— thinking back on it, he was always fucked-up, and I never— I either didn’t get it, or didn’t want to get it, or just was too busy saving everyone else to pay attention to it. But Bucky— his dad was a drunk and an asshole and spent Bucky’s entire life alternately telling him he was trash and beating the shit out of him, and when the old man got killed in an accident it still tore Bucky up something fierce because the worst part is of course he loved the guy, like any boy loves his dad, and yet I can’t even tell you how many times I cleaned Bucky up after ‘fights’ and noticed there wasn’t a mark on his knuckles. He never once took a swing at the guy.”

Sam stared at him in silence for a long moment before saying, “Well, that’s fuckin’ peachy.”

“I saw a little of it, once,” Steve said, pulling the Tupperware out and testing the temperature. He stuck it back in for one-one-one longer. He knew the numbers stood for seconds but had no real notion of how many seconds things needed. “Bucky didn’t know, I never said I saw it. He woulda been, he woulda been mad.” He rubbed his face. “Probably the only time I didn’t get into it with a bully. What’s that say about me, huh?” He looked over at Sam, who made a face like he was going to say something, and Steve shook his head and jerked the refrigerator door open angrily. It was the most helpless he’d ever felt, trapped by his knowledge that Bucky would never, never forgive him for getting involved. It had been his first real experience with a situation where there was no right thing to do, no course of action that wouldn’t hurt someone badly.

“The ol’ man would get drunk and go after Bucky’s mom,” he said, quieter, staring into the fridge. “It was a regular thing, Bucky told me a little about it. Used to be his mom would give back as good as she got, broke a lot of dishes and all, but after they moved back to New York, ol’ Jim Senior didn’t know when to stop anymore. So he’d come after Mary, and Bucky would just get between them, no matter what, again and again, and eventually the ol’ man would give up on the ol’ lady and just kick the shit out of Bucky, yell all kinds of mean things at him. And Bucky never made a sound, never said a word, wouldn’t talk about it. And his mom would get mad at him for it, would resent him for it, but when shit got bad she’d still run and hide behind him and let him do it.”

Sam rubbed his forehead. “Wow,” he said. Steve gave up on figuring out what he wanted in the fridge, and shut the door gently as if he could make up for his violence in opening it.

“The ol’ man got killed on the job, in the machine shop where they worked,” Steve said. “Bucky worked with him, he was there and saw it happen, and I was there, I worked part-time in the office. I didn’t see it but I heard it. A big piece of machinery fell and caught two guys, and Bucky’s dad took the worst of it. It didn’t kill him outright, it took him probably twenty minutes, half an hour to die. I ran around calling ambulances and getting guys from the shop next door to come help and everything, and it probably took ‘em fifteen-twenty minutes to cut the frame and shift the machine; they got the other guy out, they saved him, just his leg all fucked-up, but it was pretty obvious old Barnes wasn’t gonna make it. And Bucky’s losin’ it, and the old man— he’s just, he’s such a _dick_ , he says, well, I know you’re good at takin’ care of your mom and sisters, so just try not to fuck that up, and then he drowns in his own blood and that’s that, I had to carry Bucky back to his mom’s place, pretty much, he about lost his mind. Closest the old shithead ever came to bein’ good to him.”

“Man,” Sam said. “How old were you guys?”

“My mom had been dead like, less than a year,” Steve said. “So like… 20? Maybe twenty-one. Bucky had already moved out, we shared an apartment then. Really it was just his, so it was this tiny place, but—“ He shrugged. “I was little, I didn’t take up a lot of space back then.”

The microwave had long since stopped, and Steve tested the temperature of the pasta again and mentally threw up his hands, dumping it onto the two plates anyway and setting them on the table. 

“So that’s just a heartwarming story,” Sam said.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I got Bucky real drunk, and he’s cryin’ that it’s his fault because he wished the old man dead so many times, and nothin’ I could say would get him to stop thinkin’ that, he was just sick with it.”

“Oh for—“ Sam rubbed his face. “Man I know about feeling conflicted over stuff like that but for real, this is like a perfect storm of fucked-up shit.”

“Did you get him to eat anything?” Steve asked belatedly, poking at his food. 

“I made him a sandwich,” Sam said, “and it was like, a two-hour process, but he eventually ate half of it when I ate the other half, so I made him another one and he eventually got that down, and I think it stayed down. Enough that he could take all the goddamn supplements they make him take now.”

“His bones are falling apart,” Steve commented mildly, “so he kind of has to take those supplements.”

“Why doesn’t that happen to you?” Sam asked. 

Steve looked over at him. “First off, Erskine’s process was better, second off, I went through one freeze-thaw cycle not a hundred, and third, I didn’t derive most of my nutrition from a force-feeding tube for several decades. And probably fourthly, I haven’t had countless surgeries while awake and aware and strapped down, with minimal recovery times before being given electroconvulsive therapy and unleashed on hapless innocents for physically-punishing confrontations prior to being refrozen.”

“Fuck,” Sam said, “what, they didn’t even knock him out?”

“Apparently not,” Steve said. “Apparently they never completely sedated him, just paralyzed him.”

“That’s what he meant by not tranquilizers,” Sam said blankly. Then he shook himself. “I gotta stop thinkin’ about this or I’m not gonna be able to eat either.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Like you said, gotta keep your strength up or you’re no help.” They ate in silence for a moment, and finally Steve said, “I assume he’s asleep.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I gave him another big dose of painkillers when I realized he was hurting bad and had been trying not to let on for like two hours. That made me feel pretty great about my observation skills.”

“He’s not used to anybody doing anything about it,” Steve said tiredly. “I’m sure it never occurred to him to mention it.”

“It’s just— when he’s acting like a person he’s so convincing,” Sam said. “Sometimes. He sounds like a regular guy and he’s funny and he’s clever, and it all seems fine, and then you realize like—“ He gestured, and broke off, shaking his head, and Steve knew what he meant. 

“Yeah,” he said, and finished what was on his plate. He dumped it into the sink— he’d clean later when he inevitably wouldn’t be able to sleep— and came back and put his arms around Sam’s shoulders from behind, resting his cheek against Sam’s head. “Thank you for being here,” he murmured. 

“Oh, uh-uh,” Sam said, tilting his head back so their cheeks slid together, soft skin and stubble. “Hey. We’re not doing thank-yous, we’re not doing favors or owe-you-ones, this is life, man. I told you, I’m all in.”

“You are,” Steve said, and hugged him tighter. “I’m not— I’m just saying, you being here is the only thing that’s making this not horrible.”

He could feel the way Sam’s face moved as he smiled. “Well,” he said. “I have that effect on a situation.”

“You do,” Steve said. “You really do.”

 

Making out on the couch turned into making out in Sam’s guest-bedroom (farther down the hall away from Bucky’s room; Steve didn’t fancy finding out what would happen if Bucky heard him gasp or something and misinterpreted it and came to the rescue). Sam was all warm comfort and capable hands, and Steve gave himself over to it in a way he only seemed to be able to when Sam was around. 

It was a messy place, the inside of his head; Bucky was in there, all over in there, and even though his body was different, it remembered this, remembered the way they’d felt together. It had been so much more innocent then, growing as it had out of childish silliness, and even now Steve was pretty sure Bucky would never have considered himself gay at all. They’d never really talked about it, but all of their sexual encounters had been framed in the narrative conceit of them combining their understanding of the world to figure out how it all worked. Steve had been more sexually precocious when it came to figuring it out; Bucky had done a lot more of the actual experimenting, due to being a great deal more in-demand as a partner in their general social circle. They’d joked that Steve was the ideas guy and Bucky was the hands-on.

Later, it was more each of them providing comfort to the other. They’d never kissed outside of bed, never considered themselves ‘together’ like that. But they’d done this, and it was a mess in Steve’s head as he braced himself in the cradle of Sam’s thighs and rubbed against him, took him in hand, kissed him. 

Twenty feet away Bucky was drugged into oblivion to keep the terror from consuming him, and here Steve was doing things with Sam he’d only ever done with Bucky, but with Sam it meant something, it meant they were together, it meant they were going to make something of it. 

“You’re thinkin’ too hard,” Sam murmured, and Steve laughed silently because how could he tell? “I just know,” Sam answered, like he’d spoken aloud. “I know, Steve, and it’s okay, I know.”

“I want to give you everything,” Steve said, ragged, desperate; he was close, he was so close, and Sam kissed him hard. _But I can’t,_ he couldn’t make himself say, _I can’t, I can’t_.

“Yeah but if you had everything going spare to just hand to me like that,” Sam said, breathless— oh, he was close too— “you wouldn’t be the kind of guy I wanted it from, yeah?”

Steve bit off a gasp and came, shuddering hard, pushing down against Sam, and used the slippery mess he’d made to jerk Sam off with relentless efficiency. Sam came with his hands in Steve’s hair and his body arching up against him, gorgeous and luminous even in the dark, beautiful like an angel and so open, so pure, so bright. 

Steve put his face in the crook of Sam’s shoulder and nuzzled at him, finding his discarded shirt and cleaning them off so he wouldn’t have to move, wouldn’t have to lose this closeness. It took him a moment to get enough breath back to speak. 

“Yeah but there’s having a full dance card and then there’s just being a goddamn disaster,” Steve said. 

Sam laughed. “You still talkin’? Fuckin’, go to sleep man, we can resume our busy agenda of feelin’ shitty about everything in the mornin’.”

Steve rolled onto his side and pulled Sam tight against himself, and to his own surprise, he did fall asleep.

 

He woke up at like, two in the goddamn morning, but it had been a pretty solid four hours or so of sleep, and it was probably time to check up on Bucky’s medication anyway. He managed to slip out of bed without waking Sam up, and he went and washed up a bit in the bathroom, drank a whole bunch of water, stared at himself in the mirror a bit. 

_Steve, you really are a goddamn disaster_ , he thought, _and if you screw that beautiful boy up you are never going to forgive yourself_. It was real upsetting to think it, because of course he knew precisely how much he’d regret it; he’d screwed Bucky up pretty good, even before he’d left him for dead. He’d been so hell-bent on saving the world, but he’d never once said a word to Mr. Barnes Sr., never once tried to save Bucky from him, never once returned the favor Bucky did by putting himself in between everyone’s fists and Steve’s face. He’d sort of assumed he had, but on closer scrutiny, everything he’d ever done had been in service of his own agenda. He’d never really once fought a battle for Bucky. Bucky had given, and given, and given, and that was what their relationship had been, Bucky putting himself in between fists and Steve.

And to take that, to take the inability to give up that had kept Bucky going, had made him scrape himself up off the ground and put himself back in harm’s way over and over and over for people who never had thanked him for it— Zola, HYDRA, all of them had taken that and turned it into a perversion of itself, into an unstoppable implacable merciless machine of destruction. 

About the only humane aspect of it was that they’d planned to have Bucky destroyed before he’d ever have to confront the shattered pieces of what that meant. 

Well, Steve had fucked that up, or more properly, Bucky had fucked it up for them, and Steve would be damned if he let Bucky regret that. 

He collected himself, switched the lights off, let his eyes adjust, and went down the hallway to Bucky’s room, easing carefully in the door, ready for Bucky to startle badly. “Hey,” he murmured, “it’s me, you need a pill.”

There was no answer, and he moved closer and realized with a sudden stab of cold shock that the bed was empty, the sheets turned back as neatly as a one-armed man could make them. At least Bucky hadn’t flung himself out of bed in a panic again. Steve closed one eye to save his night-vision and switched the light on, making sure Bucky wasn’t on the floor. He checked the room, under the bed, in the closet— no. 

He turned the light off and went down the hall to the living room. But Bucky wasn’t there either. His heart was beating fast now: where the hell had he gone? He wasn’t in the bathroom— he went back and checked in the tub, he hadn’t looked there, but no. He went back to the living room, looked through the kitchen. JARVIS was set to notify him of any entrance or exit from the apartment; he checked the interface and the door hadn’t been opened. 

Ventilation shaft? He eyed the grate calculatingly. It was attached, though, pretty solidly. Natasha knew a trick to remove and replace it, but he didn’t. And Bucky was almost as big as he was, there was no way he could get up there, and with one arm. No way. 

A hologram popped up, startling him, but it was just JARVIS’s interface, telling him silently _No one has entered or exited via the ventilation shafts during the last three days._

“Shit,” Steve muttered, rubbing his face. 

_Mr. Barnes is in your bedroom, according to the security footage_ , JARVIS blinked. _He went in before your arrival home this evening and has not left the room. The bedrooms, of course, are not monitored._

Steve stared at the blinking letters. “Thank you,” he murmured faintly, pressing his hand against his chest as if he could calm his wild heartbeat that way.

He approached his bedroom carefully, sliding the door open slowly and quietly. Sure enough, his formerly neatly-made bed was unmade, but there was no one in it and the blankets were missing. He stood in the doorway, at a bit of a loss, then moved carefully into the room. “Buck?” he murmured. “You in here?”

There was no answer. He switched on the bedside lamp, and moved into the room carefully. Not on the floor, not enough room for him to be under the bed, and as Steve straightened up from checking under the bed anyway, he noticed the closet door was ajar. 

“Jesus,” he whispered, and went over. Sure enough, Bucky was in there, on the floor, curled into the tiniest ball imaginable for a man his size, with all of the blankets from Steve’s bed pulled up over him and covering his head. The only part of him visible was part of one sock-clad foot where the blankets had rucked up. 

Bucky wasn’t moving, and at first Steve thought he must be fast asleep, but as he stared at him trying to figure out if he should be touched or upset, he noticed that he was breathing fast and shallow, not at all like he did while asleep. 

“Bucky,” Steve said softly, and moved closer. “Buck. Hey. It’s okay. Hey.”

Bucky made a quiet, broken noise. 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” Steve said, and greatly daring, he put his hand on Bucky’s nearly-visible ankle. “I’m right here now. I’ll stay with you. It’s okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

Bucky sat up with a sudden violent motion, then flinched all over and looked up at the corner of the room. _Dart guns in the security cameras_ , Steve remembered, and it hurt like a hunk of rebar through the chest. Bucky’s face was pale and hollow-eyed, hair wild, and he was breathing hard, pain showing at the corners of his eyes, in the set of his jaw. But yeah, if you didn’t know to look there, you wouldn’t know, you’d just think he was crazy. 

“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Steve said. 

“But what if I hurt somebody?” Bucky demanded, quiet but intense. “What then?”

“Bucky,” Steve said.

“Don’t you fucking dare tell me you won’t let it happen,” Bucky hissed. “It takes less than a second to break someone’s neck and you don’t have to be particularly strong to do it and Jesus Christ knows I have a fuckload of practice at it.”

“I know,” Steve said, and he put his hand very carefully around the back of Bucky’s neck and pulled their foreheads together. “I know, Buck. It could happen.”

“The man today,” Bucky said, and Steve glanced up without moving to see that Bucky’s eyes were closed. “The black man. I don’t remember his name. And I hurt him before.”

“Sam. He’s not mad,” Steve said. 

“But he’s a really good person,” Bucky said, “he’s like, he’s a _really_ good person, and what if I hurt him?”

“He is a really good person,” Steve said, “but you know, Bucky, he’s a soldier. You know? He’s faced worse. He’s made his choices. His eyes are open, Bucky. He knows what you are, he faced you at your most dangerous and he still got back up and came back for more. He knows, Bucky. He knows.”

Bucky shuddered hard. “But what if I kill him,” he whispered. 

“What if he gets hit by an RPG on our next mission?” Steve answered. “What if he gets shot? What if his wings give out and his parachute doesn’t deploy and I can’t catch him? All of these things are possible, Bucky. You’re not the only dangerous thing in this world.”

Bucky shivered again, not as hard. “But it wouldn’t be as bad,” he whispered.

Steve considered that. “No, it would, really,” he said. “Because either way, he’d still be dead, there wouldn’t be a him in the world, and it doesn’t matter how that happened. It would matter to you, sure, but I don’t think, at this point, it would matter to me. I’d hurt enough at losing him that there just wouldn’t be room to hurt any more than that.”

It seemed to be the right thing to say, despite how macabre it was, because more of the tension went out of Bucky. “You’d put me down, though,” Bucky said finally. 

“What?” Steve had to pull back and look at him, for that.

“If it got too bad,” Bucky said. In the dim lamplight his eyes were disconcertingly clear; he looked perfectly lucid and rational, if a little rough around the edges. “If you can’t fix me. You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you, Steve?”

“I,” Steve said, his mind stuttering as he caught up with what Bucky was asking him.

“They wouldn’t let me die,” Bucky said, low and intense, “they wouldn’t, and I got close a couple times and they just, they wouldn’t, they took everything from me and they took that from me, and you _wouldn’t_ , Steve, would you?”

“Bucky,” Steve said. 

“Don’t use me like that,” Bucky said. “Don’t chain me to somethin' dead and make me hang on here as this broken thing if I can’t be fixed. I never asked anything of you, Steve, I just wanted to stay with you and be good for you, and I _never_ asked _anything_ of you, and this is the only thing I’m askin’ of you. If it comes to that, I need you to let me go, and if it comes to that, I need you to do it, I need you to pull the trigger, I need you to promise me, Steve. Because I know if _you_ do it you won’t fuck it up.”

Steve stared at him. “I promise,” he said, and it hurt more than anything he’d ever said. 

 


	4. The Worst Monster They Ever Made

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha's alive. So is HYDRA's PR department. Sam cooks. Bucky makes attempts at faking humanity more convincingly. Lakeisha (the PR OC) is terrifyingly competent. Steve has crushes on people. And there's some resolution on the Howard question.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains mention of videos described in the [last chapter](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1725374/chapters/4604424) of the prequel, which I thought it would be kind of redundant to describe again. Sorry if that's a pain in the ass.  
> (Actually, the Steve video is in the chapter before, I think.)

“Show me,” Barnes said, low and hoarse. Sam grimaced, looking from Steve to Lakeisha. Barnes’ jaw tightened, a mulish expression that was rapidly becoming familiar and actually explaining a lot of how Steve was, and he sat forward. “ _Show. Me_.”

It was supposed to just be Lakeisha meeting Bucky and getting to know him a little, maybe getting some input on the PR war she was apparently still waging for him, and maybe laying the groundwork for some social media updates starring him when he was a little more camera-ready. 

But he hadn’t seen the video HYDRA had put out, hadn’t seen their counter-offering, couldn’t clearly remember filming the clips he’d sent Steve in his reports that they’d used to compile the video. His phone had gone missing during his rescue— it was probably in the locker where they’d dumped most of Barnes’ effects since so many of them were weapons— so he hadn’t been online at all, hadn’t been up on any of it. 

The other two were both looking at Sam now. He made a face. “Why you lookin’ at me?” he said, throwing his hands up. “I got no clearer notion of what to do here than you-all. I say, man wants to see the videos, he’s got the right.”

“Some of it’s pretty upsetting,” Steve said. 

“I am a cyborg fuckin’ _assassin_ ,” Barnes said, deeply weary, “my entire _existence_ is pretty fuckin’ upsetting. Show me the goddamn video and if I flip out I flip out. I was probably gonna anyway.”

Barnes had actually managed to be astonishingly normal, even charming, upon meeting Lakeisha; he’d thanked her for saving his life, had made all the right noises over her photos of the kid who shared his name, had said nice things about her mother (who had bought him a bagel in a laundromat and who he seemed to believe was some sort of incarnated saint, probably not erroneously— Sam knew the type, was _related to_ the type). But now that he was down to business, his easy charm had mostly been buried under the blank expression he wore when he was too upset to play nice.

“You saw the one of Steve,” Lakeisha said, collecting herself admirably and pulling out her tablet. 

“Where he said I wasn’t crazy?” Barnes nodded. “Yeah. It was nice.”

“So after that, this video went up.” Her fingers were flying over the interface with the tablet. She looked up. “Is that TV StarkTech? Why did I just ask that out loud?” 

Steve shrugged, though which question he was answering Sam couldn’t guess. Didn’t matter. Lakeisha flicked the video from her screen over to the TV, and Steve cringed as the title screen came up, Bucky’s sullen mug shot and the red text CODENAME: WINTER SOLDIER. 

Sam watched Barnes watch the video. His expression was impassive, except that he flinched when— on-screen, he’d just been shot twice, and he’d flinched twice, in time with the soundless shots. “Who the fuck _filmed_ that,” he said, but the scene had already changed, and flashed up the “102 CONFIRMED KILLS” caption.

“One oh two,” Barnes said. “Huh. I got a totally different number when I did the math.”

“Think you’re workin’ from different sources,” Sam said. 

Barnes watched the rest in silence. It stopped on the final still, which was Bucky’s face frozen in a wild-eyed, silent scream with the title superimposed over it again. 

“Well,” he said. “Fair enough, I guess.”

“No it’s not,” Steve said, heated. 

Barnes shot him a look. “You made it sound like they were spreading all these crazy lies,” he said. “At least that shit all actually happened.”

“That freeze-frame is creeping me the fuck out,” Sam said. 

“Sorry,” Lakeisha said, and flicked another video over from her tablet. It was the one she’d made with Dorothea. That one just had the sunset scene as the opening screen. 

“The video conveniently leaves out all mention of the _reasons_ those things actually happened,” Steve said. 

“Steve’s not mad at you,” Sam said, sort of absently, “even though he sounds like it.”

That took the wind out of Steve’s sails a little, and he said, horrified, “Of course not!”

“I got that,” Barnes said, “actually.” But he did crack an indulgent half-smile at Sam. Sam was trying not to be a little bit triumphant about how much Barnes seemed to like him. For his part, he was still astonished at how much he genuinely liked the guy in return. By all rights Barnes should be pretty much a hollow shell, but he had managed to salvage and rebuild a fair amount of the infrastructure of a personality. It was still gonna be a hard road for the guy to achieve any kind of normal life, but if you’d asked Sam a month ago, say while he was on a frantic worldwide hunt for him and wondering whether Steve was actually unhinged too, he’d’ve said there was basically no chance they’d ever find this much of him even with years of therapy.

It was nice to be wrong. It rarely happened, so Sam was able to enjoy it when it did.

Lakeisha hit play, and Barnes sat in wary silence, watching the video. “I never saw that drawing before,” he said, when the one of him with his fists clenched came up on the screen, _“BUCKY” 1938_. 

“It was in one of the notebooks Peggy saved,” Steve said. 

“I forgot about those voicemails,” Barnes said, reacting to the voiceover. “Christ, Steve, you’re a hard man to reach.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. Barnes threw him a glance. 

“Don’t beat yourself up,” he said, and thwapped Steve on the arm with the back of his hand. “’S my job.” He turned and saw the screen again and recoiled; it was the footage of himself in the train bathroom. “Yuugh, what an ugly mug. Musta scared the hell outta you, to see me lookin’ like that.”

“I watched those video reports dozens of times each,” Steve said quietly. “I didn’t even care what you were saying. It was the first time, I think, I really believed it was _you_ , really truly. First time I really dared to hope there was anything left.”

Barnes didn’t have an answer for that. He looked at Steve, then looked back at the TV, obviously thinking that over. “You drew a lot of pictures of me,” Bucky said.

“You were always around,” Steve answered, a little teasing. 

Barnes just nodded, staring at the screen. He didn’t say anything else, just watched, and as the screen faded out on him saying, “ _Goodbye, Steve_ ,” he rubbed at his face with his hand. 

“I have almost no memory of filming half of those things,” he said. 

“You can watch the unedited clips sometime,” Steve said. “There’s more stuff. Some of it’s kinda… well, lots of dead bodies.”

Barnes nodded slowly. “I remember doing that,” he said. “I remember doing all that stuff. I just— I dunno. It wasn’t that long ago but it feels like it was.”

“Understandable,” Sam said. 

“Yeah,” Barnes said, “I’m not, y’know, freaked out. It makes sense, I was pretty brain-damaged. I’d write shit in marker on the walls so I’d remember it. I didn’t sleep a lot, but I had a lot of blackouts and seizures and things. Got a habit of writing the name of the city where I was on the inside of the door of whatever room I was in— it’s not incriminating, and it did a lot to catch me up when I woke up out of nowhere like I always did.”

“Seizures,” Sam said, carefully mild. He’d wondered about that, with the amount of plain old brain damage Bucky must have sustained.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, noncommittal. 

“Still get those?” Sam asked. 

Bucky tilted his head, closest he usually came to a real shrug with his injuries. “Not lately?”

“That’s a thing we should look into, though,” Sam said. 

Lakeisha had flicked another video onto the screen. “Wait,” Steve said, “I didn’t see this one.”

“There’s a series,” Lakeisha said. “Started going up about 24 hours after you guys brought Barnes in. I was still updating the feed, making Twitter posts about the medical status of the various casualties and all, so I saw them start to go up in realtime. There are six so far. The last one went up this morning.”

“Fuck,” Bucky said softly, looking at the freeze-frame; it was another mug shot, only zoomed out more to show his head and upper body, waist up. Onscreen, Bucky had a crew cut, a split lip, blood all down his face, and was wearing a white sleeveless shirt that was literally soaked in blood to the point that the color was nearly unguessable. 

“You know what that’s from?” Steve asked. 

Bucky nodded tightly. “It was a clusterfuck,” he said. “I don’t remember where it was or when it was but I came out of cryo to them buzzing my hair and I went back in full of bullets in that fuckin’ shirt.”

“That’s your blood?” Sam asked. 

“Some,” Bucky said. He grimaced, and amended, “Most.”

Lakeisha nodded grimly, and hit the play button. The frame stayed unmoving for a moment, and then text appeared. 

WINTER SOLDIER, it read, MISSION X-5902, and then black boxes like censored text. An animation of a cursor hovered, then text appeared as if it were being typed. 

CASUALTIES: 10 ENEMY COMBATANTS

5 CIVILIAN BYSTANDERS

6 FELLOW TEAM MEMBERS

The cursor hovered, blinking, then the screen reset itself, still over the still shot of the blood-soaked Bucky glowering into the camera. 

INJURIES: and the cursor blinked a moment.

GUNSHOT WOUND TO LEFT LOWER LEG

GUNSHOT WOUND TO LEFT THIGH

GUNSHOT WOUND TO LEFT LOWER ABDOMEN

GUNSHOT WOUND TO RIGHT UPPER CHEST

GUNSHOT WOUND TO RIGHT UPPER ARM

GUNSHOT WOUND TO RIGHT SHOULDER

The cursor blinked a moment, and Bucky said, “Guy got off a machine-gun burst before I got him. Sucked.”

The screen cleared, but the INJURIES line remained, and more text appeared

KNIFE WOUND TO LEFT UPPER CHEST

KNIFE WOUND TO FACE

KNIFE WOUND TO STOMACH

FINGERNAIL SCRATCHES TO FACE

FINGERNAIL SCRATCHES ON LEFT OF NECK

The cursor blinked again, then the screen cleared. It went black, and text appeared quickly letter by letter, pausing after each line with a blinking cursor. 

_Soldier returned alone from mission_

_When asked as to fate of teammates, did not know_

_Was six hours late to rendezvous_

_Had four severed left human ears in his possession._

The screen went black, and then suddenly was filled with a closeup video of Bucky’s face partially obscured by machinery, a rubber mouthguard clenched between his teeth, eyes rolling back in his head as he suffered some kind of seizure or shock. 

Sam looked over at Bucky, who was sitting with his mouth held tightly, glowering almost as sullenly as he had in the first image— and he could see, in person, now, that it wasn’t a sullen angry glower, it was pain and terror and sick creeping horror that made his face take on that expression. It wasn’t clear in the stills, but in person, it was. 

The video ended on the same still it had begun with, on the same title screen. WINTER SOLDIER, it read. 

“They’re all like that,” Lakeisha said. “Just statistics over mostly stills, and scraps of video. Presented as mission reports, implying more than they say.”

“You can take six machine-gun bullets,” Steve said, turning to Bucky, eyebrows raised.

Bucky looked grim. “Apparently,” he said. “It wasn’t like it was any fun. Had to walk to the extraction site and I kept passing out.” He gestured at the screen without looking at it. “And they make it sound like it’s fuckin’ suspicious I was late to the rendezvous. What the fuck they think is gonna happen, I get shot six times and get _faster_?”

“Am I gonna be the asshole who mentions the ears?” Sam asked. 

“That’s all you,” Lakeisha said. 

Bucky looked down and away without moving his head. “One of the objectives,” he said. “To prove we’d killed who we were supposed to. I never knew how they could tell whose ears they were, but that was what they’d asked for, so I took ‘em.” He glanced over at Sam, and there was misery in the set of his mouth. “Hardly the worst thing I had to do on that mission.”

“No,” Sam said softly, “I imagine crawling out full of bullets was worse.”

Bucky shook his head. “Crawlin’ out draggin’ the last of my team to die,” he corrected. “Got almost two miles before I realized he’d already bled out. No, we had to kill kids. I fuckin’ hated it when we had to kill kids. Even when they wiped me down to nothing there was still enough left that I hated it.”

Sam glanced at Lakeisha, who didn’t look shocked at all, which confirmed his suspicions that this wasn’t the worst of the videos. 

“I never lied,” Bucky said, sounding angry, but his voice shook a little and not with anger. “I never hid any of this.” He went on, after a moment, quieter, “I didn’t volunteer it either because I didn’t remember it, but more of it keeps coming back.”

“Buck,” Steve said softly. 

“What do they want?” Bucky asked, pushing his hair back out of his face. “They want me put down? They want me in prison? They just gonna keep puttin’ out all the highlights of my long career? I mean, I might not remember some of this shit otherwise.” His voice had gone bitter. “And that would just be a fucking _tragedy_ , you know, not to remember all of that shit in excruciating fuckin’ _loving_ detail, when I don’t even know what happened to my _mother_.” His voice cracked.

Steve squeezed his eyes shut, and Lakeisha said, her voice gentle and neutral, “You have a right to see these, but you don’t have to watch them. I can just tell you what’s in them and what the plan is to counter them. We’ve already begun to respond.”

“Maybe we should see the response,” Sam suggested diplomatically. “We can come back and see the rest of their garbage videos some other time?”

“We didn’t make a response video,” Lakeisha said. “It would be putting words in Barnes’s mouth, among other things. I don’t want to speak for you when you’re capable of speaking for yourself.”

“Debatable,” Bucky said. 

She tilted her head, tapping at her tablet. In a moment she pulled up a screen full of text, and using the tablet, scrolled slowly down. “This is the aggregated feed of everything I’ve been posting since this whole thing started,” she said. “It’s a static page on the Avengers dot org main site— slash Winter Soldier, so it tends to come up when people search on that term. And I’ve put up some overview text posts, some image galleries. I have the videos linked to. What Dorothea and I put together as a response was that we combed through and found whatever references we could to those missions in all the declassified SHIELD/HYDRA database materials. We had several former SHIELD agents help us with this. So here’s what we’ve done.”

She pulled up an image. It was the frame from the video they’d just watched where all the casualties were enumerated. Over the top of it, in white text that was higher-contrast than anything else and drowned it out, was: 

“Mission X-5902 was ordered in winter of 1982 by Agent Frank Osborne, a double-agent nominally in SHIELD but high on the HYDRA org chart. The purpose of the mission was to destabilize a volatile region by assassinating a politician and his family. A strike team of six, plus the Winter Soldier, was sent with detailed orders. The politician was better-guarded than anticipated. All seven would-be assassins were shot in the firefight that ensued; the Winter Soldier survived, badly injured, completed the mission, and returned as ordered. The mission report comments on the fact that even when severely injured and alone, the Soldier’s conditioning had held up and he had remained under their control.”

Across the bottom of the image, in gray, it said _#savebucky_ — the hashtag, in that font, laid out that way, was everywhere on the page, a repeated graphic, watermarking images and in the still frames of videos.

“Where I could find information,” Lakeisha said quietly, “I’ve simply put less-misleadingly-phrased mission reports up, and made it as clear as possible that at all times, you were acting under orders and without agency of your own. Turning the videos back on themselves, and making clear exactly who the monster was: not the weapon, but the men who aimed it.”

“That’s good,” Sam said, impressed. “Like— you’re _good_.”

She smiled at him. “I’m tryin’,” she said. “You know I got a promotion for this.” She’d already said as much; when Bucky had thanked her for saving his life, she’d replied by saying he didn’t owe her anything because he’d worked such wonders for her career. 

“Well,” Steve said, “you deserved it.”

She tilted her head. “We’ll see,” she said. “So, anyway. I figured, I’d better meet you, Barnes, and touch base with you a little bit. If we can get you to make some kind of a statement, in writing or on camera or whatever, that’d probably help. But as you can see, we got a lot to work with.”

“What’s the end goal?” Bucky asked hoarsely, still staring at the screen. 

“The end goal?” Lakeisha smiled. “The end goal is to beat them, Barnes. I want to discredit your opponents. I want to clear your name. I want you to be as popular and beloved as any of the Avengers. I don’t want there to be anyone out there who could possibly misunderstand and think you did any of that stuff of your own volition. That’s what the end goal is: to clear your name in the court of public opinion.”

“Tall order,” Bucky said. 

“Doable,” Lakeisha answered loftily, head tilted in challenge. 

 

* * * 

_Posted on Twitter from Natasha’s official Avengers-linked Black Widow account, then screencapped and arranged in chronological order with a #savebucky graphic, posted to the Avengers website’s wintersoldier page._

 

[Natasha]: have you ever seen what a 9mm round does to a human head

[Natasha]: that amount of damage is what [@Barnes] was willing to inflict on himself to escape his captors

[Natasha]: that amount of damage is what he would willingly have chosen rather than be under their control again

[Natasha]: he was counting down the seconds before he knew he’d lose consciousness and was going to pull the trigger right before

[Natasha]: he got down to 2 before Cap showed up, I’ve no doubt he’d have done it

[Natasha]: you who are so eager to condemn him can’t possibly think he doesn’t know what a bullet does to a face

[Natasha]: if you think any of the missions he performed as the Winter Soldier were anything he would choose

[Natasha]: I again invite you to consider the amount of damage a 9mm round at point-blank range would inflict on a human skull

[Natasha]: <img attachment>: [badly pixelated but recognizable image of Barnes on rooftop during standoff with pistol held to his own jaw] #savebucky

 

* * * 

 

Natasha’s phone was blinking a notification when she woke up, and she fumbled it off the side table to look at it. A text. From Bucky. Someone had given him back his phone. A tiny stab of worry went through her: had he seen all of the shit about him on the Internet now? 

“Lksha says you’re out of the hospital and moved to med floor in stk tower,” he wrote. “Am on many drugs but ambulatory, lmk if u want visit.” 

He had odd ideas about appropriate abbreviations, but she supposed he got his point across. She considered that for a moment. Well, if he’d spoken to Lakeisha (that cluster of consonants could not refer to anyone else), odds were good he knew what he needed to know about the Internet. She’d done her part, in a long painful process with Lakeisha patiently pulling the story from her in between bouts of semiconsciousness. It was no small contribution on her part, and had been a wrench to put down, but she’d done it, largely by dint of reminding herself that this was not new information about herself that she was revealing; anyone who dug through the data dump she’d put online last year would know this, even if they wouldn’t have understood it.

And for him, it was worth it. She did want to see him. She wasn’t very tolerant of visitors when she was injured, but she knew he wouldn’t be awkward or stupid about it, he’d been shot enough to know better. With a sigh, she began the tedious process of sitting up, aided by the bed’s mechanized tilting function. She started to tap out a reply when a shadow in the corner of the room struck her as wrong. 

Bucky was just inside the doorway, against the wall to the left, standing perfectly still and watching her. “Creep,” she said, “how long have you been there?”

“Couple days,” he said, deadpan. He seemed uncomfortable, which wasn’t surprising— the medical floor wasn’t exactly a hospital, but it was unmistakably medical, with linoleum tile floors and industrial lighting and easy-to-sterilize fixtures, and things like oxygen tubing in the walls and so on. 

“You’re probably bored,” she said. 

“Nah,” he said, “I’m drugged as fuck, I have no clear notion of the passage of time.”

She frowned. “They find drugs that work on you?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Which is kind of great and kind of awful.” He stepped away from the wall and came towards her. He was wrapped in a too-large blue hoodie, and his hair was either filthy or wet. And his left arm was at least half-missing, she surmised; it was all immobilized in some kind of sling under the sweatshirt, but there wasn’t enough bulk there. 

“I feel that,” she said. She held up her phone. “I just got your text.”

“I figured you were probably asleep,” he said, taking up a position right next to her bed, close enough that she could reach out and touch him. So she did, running her fingers along the front of his sweatshirt. It was soft, and she recognized it now as one of Steve’s. This close, she could smell shampoo: his hair was wet. And he’d shaved, and cut himself a little doing so. He looked tired, and hollow, and yeah, a little hazy, a little drugged. 

So was she, so she smiled up at him like she was a regular girl and he was a regular boy she fancied who’d come to see her, because sometimes when she was injured she liked to play the role of being a normal person, and imagine what it would be like to have a lifestyle where getting shot wasn’t fairly routine. 

“I’m drugged as fuck too,” she said, and took his hand in hers, sliding her fingers between his. 

He smiled, at that, a small sad smile. “I saw your Tweets,” he said. “Thank you. It was well said.”

“I assume,” she said, “if you saw those, that you saw a whole lot of other bullshit.”

He sighed, and looked down at their hands. “Yeah,” he said. His jaw tightened, then let go again. “I want to tell them all to go fuck themselves, but Lakeisha has advised that I send anything I want to say to her first, so she can make sure it doesn’t lead to unintended consequences.”

Natasha made a face. “Probably wise, for now.”

He didn’t look up. “Probably,” he said quietly. 

“You should, though,” she said. He glanced up at her, questioning. “You should say something. Run it by her, but do speak. You’ve been gagged long enough.”

He considered her for a moment, then smiled tautly again, looking back down at where she was still holding his hand. “She wants to record a video with me,” he said. “I, I don’t know what I want to say.” He shook his head very slightly. “If I don’t think about it, I feel fine. If I think about it at all, I’m so angry. That seems to be all there is— total indifference or blinding rage. Neither one makes for a good answer to all the shit out there.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t suppose.” She slid her fingers through his, feeling his calluses and rubbing her thumb across his palm.

“Hey,” he said, and she looked up at him. He looked solemnly at her, and she’d already managed to forget how blue his eyes were. “I’m sorry you got hurt.”

“So am I,” she said. “Lung injuries are the worst. You’re pretty good in a fight, Bucky. You were killing people with your eyes closed.”

“I got instincts,” he said, visibly uncomfortable, and she decided to let that drop. 

“Steve said you were doing okay,” she said, changing the subject. “But they had to get you out of the hospital floor.”

“Don’t like hospitals,” Bucky said, and yeah, there was a surprise.

“Then let’s get out of this one,” she said. 

He looked alarmed. “Are you allowed to do that?”

“I do what I want,” she said. She sat up, testing her equilibrium. She was at the sweet spot, where the drugs were in effect enough that she wasn’t in bad pain, but not so much that she was loopy. 

The bonus to Tony Stark’s private hospital was that she was wearing her own pyjamas, not a hospital gown, and had her dressing gown right there. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and Bucky came closer, alarmed. “Are you sure?” he asked. 

“Lemme hold your elbow,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

She threaded her hands through the elbow of his free arm, which she could tell made him nervous. But it was probably just as well he get used to being vulnerable in this space. She resigned herself inwardly to getting dropped if he got too badly startled. It was okay, she would probably be able to land all right and not drive her broken ribs back into her lung or anything like that.

They made it to the elevator without anyone stopping them, but Bucky was kind of wild-eyed and nervous, twitching intermittently, and she paused with him in front of the doors as they opened. “You okay with elevators?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” he muttered unconvincingly. 

“You taken this one before?” she asked. 

“I… walked down here,” he admitted. 

“If you’re not gonna be okay we don’t have to get in it,” she said. 

He looked in asessingly, and she pressed the door open button to hold it. “Yeah,” he said, “I can do this.”

“If you’re not okay we really, really don’t have to,” she said. 

He gave her a look. “I’m in protective custody in a goddamn skyscraper,” he said. “If I can’t learn to handle the elevator I might as well throw myself out the window.” He steeled himself and got in.

She went in after him and stood right up next to him. “Is it the closeness, or the motion?” she asked quietly as the door closed. 

“Neither,” he said, and stared up at the ceiling, jaw set. No— he was looking at the corner where the security camera was hidden. Why? Surely he knew the cameras were in every room, it wasn’t like the elevator was uniquely well-monitored.

It was a disconcertingly fast elevator, and they were at their destination in no time. The door slid open and he blinked. “That’s it?”

“We weren’t going far,” she said. 

“Oh,” he said. “I’ve— I’ve been here.”

“Good,” she said. It was the common floor, and she guided him to the sitting area, because she needed to sit down. Pathetic, but it would be a while before her lungs worked worth a damn again. Few more days at least. (She didn’t have Steve’s accelerated healing, but she definitely healed faster than regular people. Still wasn’t fast enough to suit her, but it was better than nothing. She didn’t envy him his physique; she’d never make it as a spy looking like that.)

“In the middle of the night,” he said. “Nobody else was here. But Steve said sometimes people hang out here.”

“They do,” Natasha said. The TV was on. Good. She picked her way across the room, and found Clint there watching a cooking show. “There you are,” she said, pleased. 

“Nat,” Clint said, sitting up, “what the hell are you doing out of bed?”

“This guy came and sprung me,” she said. 

“Hey,” Clint said, grinning at Bucky. “So you’re okay too, huh?”

“I’m sorry you got hurt,” Bucky said. “Was it bad? They didn’t tell me.”

“Oh,” Clint said, “in-and-out— pretty superficial flesh wound but it broke my shoulder blade. So, annoying, but not serious.”

Bucky was still awfully on-edge, and Natasha pulled him down to sit with her. He was very tolerant of her touching him, and she wondered if that was genuine or because he was afraid, or because it didn’t occur to him to resist. He was very twitchy, frequently suppressing shudders, and she wondered if his injuries were bothering him even through whatever painkillers they’d found that worked on him.

 He stared at the television for a long moment. “What are they doing?” he asked finally. 

“Oh,” Clint said, “it’s a thing, they’re all given the same ingredient and then they have a set amount of time to make the best thing they can out of it, and then the judges vote who did best.”

“Are those…” Bucky frowned. 

“Live squid,” Clint said. “This is my favorite episode, that’s why I’m watching it.”

“Oh my god,” Natasha said, “is Iron Chef on that box?”

“All of it,” Clint said, “including the original Japanese run.”

“Shit,” she said. “Well, I know what I’m doing for the next couple hours.”

Clint called up the queue as a marquee across the bottom. “Yeah,” he said, “I got like six more episodes queued up.”

Bucky sat forward slightly, reading the screen. He drew breath as if to speak, but let it out slowly, and sat back. “Oh,” Clint said. “You were, like, in a box, for a while, are you up to speed on how TV works now?”

“Sssssss,” Bucky said, but abandoned the word, squinting. “Uh, sort of.”

“When was television invented?” Clint asked. “Like, the fifties, right?”

“After my time,” Bucky said. “So anything I know about it is… well, I wasn’t… me when I learned it.” He looked uncertain. “I’ve watched a bit of it since I… got out. I’d forgotten what it was though, I rediscovered it and scared the hell out of myself in a hotel room in like, Hungary or Germany or New Jersey, I don’t remember. Hit the button by accident and it came on and I flipped the fuck out because I had no idea what the fuck it was.”

“Oh shit,” Clint said. “Yeah, that’d do your head in.”

Bucky shook his head, and blew out through his lips. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I remembered eventually. But they’re so giant now. I feel like that’s a new thing.”

“How long were you on ice this last time?” Natasha asked. 

He shook his head slightly. “Don’t know,” he said. “Longer than usual, I know I was in rougher shape than I normally am when I came out of it.” He made a face, and she knew what he meant, she’d watched an insufficiently-augmented man die in the thawing process once. Despite her brutality-filled life, it remained the single worst thing she had ever witnessed. “I went through the files a bit, kind of tried to get an idea of how long I was usually under. I think they never left me frozen more than a year, maybe up to two, but this last time it was definitely over five.”

“Wonder why,” Clint said, but Natasha could guess. 

“They didn’t think they needed you anymore,” she said quietly. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “I got that feeling. They did basically none of the usual maintenance when I came out either. I think they’d planned on decommissioning me after the previous mission, but nobody wanted to be the one who pulled the plug, so I was still around and they decided to haul me out one last time.” His mouth was a thin line, but he looked less on-edge and more human than he had since the elevator. 

“That’s fuckin’ grim,” Clint said. 

“If Project Insight had worked they’d never have needed me again,” Bucky said. He gave her a grim half-smile. “I’m a relic anyway, a lot of people figured I should’ve been shut down after the Cold War. You weren’t even fuckin’ _alive_ yet.”

“I was too,” Natasha said, not particularly offended. 

“I remember the Cold War pretty damn well,” Clint said. 

“I don’t,” Bucky said shortly. 

“Awkward,” Lakeisha said, and Bucky tensed up; he wasn’t startled, he must have known she was there, but he was still reacting to something. “Hey everybody. This the convalescent ward?”

“Don’t you ever get to go home?” Bucky asked, turning to look at her. 

She smiled. “I was home,” she said. “I came back. It’s been hours, man.”

“Did you get my email?” Natasha asked. 

“Oh,” Lakeisha said, “yes. I put it up right away.”

Bucky frowned, and looked at her. “Put what up?”

“I wrote a thing,” Natasha said. “A follow-up, to the Tweets.” 

He looked at her like he didn’t understand. Lakeisha tapped at the tablet she was holding, then handed it over the back of the couch to him, and he took it. 

 

<<

There seems to be some confusion about this, so I am going to clear it up. James Barnes wasn’t just acting under orders as the Winter Soldier, he had also undergone very specific and rigorous programming to ensure that he had no ability to do anything other than follow orders. Given his injuries, I doubt he is in any position to explain this process to you, at present, and so I will.

It is a multi-stage process. First, they isolate you, remove from you all ties to your past, and use basic, but brutal, behavioral conditioning— they reward you for obedience to them, they punish you for defiance. It is the same as is done with any prisoner, but no less effective for it. Part of this is that they remove your name, and there are never any reminders that you have ever been anyone or anywhere else. You are what they say you are, and no more.

Secondly, they use drugs. Drugs make you controllable and calm, and also make it hard for you to concentrate enough to remember things— like your name. Sometimes the drugs make you intermittently violent. This means you can no longer trust your own impulses. In some cases, there are drugs that change you, versions of Super Soldier serums and the like— I know nothing of the chemistry or logistics, I simply know that we were drugged. 

Yes, we. I am speaking from personal experience. You do not think that I learned this from a book? If I had, I would simply recommend the book to you. It would be easier. I am not eager to speak of this.

Thirdly there are machines. I have little doubt that many of the machines used on me were psychosomatic. I believe that some of them merely administered painful electric shocks, to no effect but to frighten, punish, and disorient us. But there were, in some facilities, other machines that had far more profound effects than even what the power of drugged suggestion could accomplish. I am not a scientist, and have not been able to piece together a rigorous scientific explanation of the precise mechanisms these machines used. But I do know that after a session in one of them, a person would emerge with no memory, with no will of his own, with no capacity for resistance. 

I was only subjected to this on one occasion— that I know of. That is, perhaps, the most difficult part of recovery. Since so many of these procedures affect primarily one’s memory, and since necessarily one does not emerge from such a program with a pleasant and trusting relationship with the persons who ran said program, there is no way of being certain what precisely was done to one in these procedures, or how many times. After a great deal of research, there are still stretches of my life I have no account of, and cannot explain. I must have had memories removed, but by the very nature of that process, I have no way to reconstruct them. 

I will leave you, for a moment, to consider that, and how profound an effect it may have even upon a recovered mind, upon a person who is now in control of her life. Do you not take for granted things like, say, the first time you try a new food, you can say with confidence, “I have never had this before”, or when you are confronted with a dilemma, “I have never done and will never do such a thing”. Can you imagine if you had no such certainty? I do not, and sometimes, I encounter things I know I have seen or done or tasted before, but I do not know when. The body remembers, even when the mind does not. Months of my life are known to me only from reflexes I cannot recall acquiring, and gaps where the seasons do not line up in order.

Do not pity us. You cannot possibly understand either of us well enough to pity us. You cannot possibly know what this must forever mean to us. I tell you this so that you will not dare to think you understand James Barnes. Because you do not.

They used the machine I spoke of earlier to “wipe” his mind, I know that was what it was called, and that was the effect. It removed episodic memory, all his ability to recall events, but left procedural memory intact— walking, talking, breathing, tying shoes, using weapons, hand-to-hand fighting, driving vehicles. All of that remained. But all memory of ever having done them before vanished. 

And once they had wiped him, they ensured that his mind did not knit itself back together by “freezing” him. This is the fourth component, unique to James Barnes: Cryostasis. How the technology works, few could tell you. I witnessed it only from the outside: his body, suspended in very cold liquid, unmoving and unchanging, for months or even years. Whatever it was, it ensured that any age, any change, any healing would slow to nearly nothing. I know that it was incredibly painful, especially the thawing process. 

There were others, which is how I know that. The others did not survive, which is why I remember it so clearly. They survived the freezing, but they did not survive the thawing. Do not ask me to recount this, but know that I have seen it. I believe James Barnes to be the only currently-living human to have survived this procedure, and how that is possible is not something I believe anyone knows: the records are incomplete of what was done to him to give him that ability.

I ask you, for just a moment, to consider the horror of waking up to that kind of agony, and knowing that months, years, perhaps even decades could have passed since you were last aware.

I invite you to consider this, and then remind you, you can’t pity him. You can’t possibly understand him well enough to pity him. 

But when you condemn him for following orders, try for a moment to think of how you would know whether an order was moral or immoral if you had no memory of a life where such concepts existed, no memory of food or sleep, no memory of learning your own native tongue (or the others you don’t know why you know), and certainly no notion of ever having made a decision on your own. You do not remember a name, do not remember an identity, do not remember a self. Do not remember a mother, do not remember friends, do not remember a church or school or teachers. The only memories you have are procedural. Your body remembers, reflex your only tie to your past. Your body remembers that disobedience brings pain, and flinches for you. You can’t remember kindness, have never read a book or heard a lullaby, but your hands know how to load a gun, know how to wield a knife; your neck remembers how to move your head to scan a rooftop for snipers, your body turns to watch for ambushes, your bones ache with old bullet wounds and remind you of the price of past incaution— but you don’t remember when you were shot, or why.

They put a muzzle on you, they arm you. They aim you, and they pull the trigger. _Choice_ is not a word a bullet knows. 

I expect to be asked how I know these things. Who am I, that I have seen them? I am Natasha Romanoff, codenamed the Black Widow, and I was made in the same factory, to different specifications. I knew the Winter Soldier, both by reputation and acquaintance. I know very well what was done to him. 

You say what you will about free will and moral obligations. But think, for a moment, how incredibly lucky you are that you have always had these things, and can take them for granted. Some of us know what luxuries they are. We have paid dearly to obtain them. 

Barnes and I both almost died on that roof, for the sake of free will and choice— I with a bullet and fragments of my own ribs in my lung, he with his veins full of poison, his bones shattered, and his own pistol to his jaw, counting down the beats of his heart against a rescue he did not think would come. Even death is a choice they take from you. Almost dying on that roof was as profound an act of defiance as has ever been committed. You could not know that, unless choice had been taken from you so utterly, for so long. 

You can’t understand him, you can’t pity him. But you also cannot judge him.

>>

 

 

“I didn’t know you could write like that,” Bucky said hoarsely. Clint leaned in, and he handed off the tablet, looking haunted. 

“Lakeisha helped,” Natasha said. 

“Pff,” Lakeisha said. “I edited a little. But they’re your words.”

“I didn’t know they’d died thawing,” Bucky said, voice low. He looked sick, worked his jaw a moment, and said, “Nothing hurts like that. Nothing makes you want to die like that.”

“I gathered,” Natasha said. He was breathing a little fast, obviously distressed. She couldn’t blame him; she’d never endured it herself, but she’d never forget how that man had died. Surviving that was almost unimaginable.

“I’m glad I didn’t see that,” Bucky said. “I wouldn’t— I’m glad I didn’t see them die.”

“Yes,” Natasha said, a little hollowly, “be glad.”

 

* * * 

 

Bucky’s shoulder was pressed warm against Steve’s. Both of them were sitting sprawled on the couch, leaning on one another, while Sam, blessed angel that he was, made dinner. Steve had a tension headache; he’d spent the day in videoconferences with various people who wanted him to surrender Bucky to various authorities, and there was no way he was going to tell Bucky about any of that. Bucky just seemed exhausted; he’d been out, for a while, hanging out with Natasha and Lakeisha, and he’d come back hiding how much pain he was in, and it had taken Steve a while to manage to get a dose of pain meds into him. But now he seemed to have relaxed a bit, and was feeling better. Steve was just enjoying the closeness and not needing to say anything.

Bucky sat up suddenly, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out his phone, frowned at it, and said, “How do I play a video on the TV?”

Steve bit his lip and edged closer to him. It was a newly-arrived text, from Lakeisha, with a URL. “What’s this?” he asked. 

“She filmed me this morning,” Bucky said. “They were going to edit it together into something. This, I assume, is it.”

“Uh,” Steve said. He turned. Sam was banging around and singing in the kitchen, so domestic and homey Steve was already dreading Sam’s inevitable return home in a couple of days. He needed to find a way to get him to stay. He couldn’t do this alone, and by _this_ , he was starting to think, he simply meant living his daily life, even apart from its myriad crises. “Sam?”

“What, now?” Sam asked, coming out and wiping his hands on the apron he was wearing that somehow managed to look workmanlike and manly on him, but made Steve look goofy. He had a dishtowel over one shoulder and was wearing one of Steve’s t-shirts and looked awesome in it, unfairly so.

“I wanna play this video on the TV,” Bucky said. 

“Ah,” Sam said. He held his hand out gently for Bucky’s phone, and Bucky gave it to him without hesitation— and without looking blank, either. He was too fuzzy for Steve’s liking, too drugged, but that was better than the tooth-grinding dead-eyed endurance of pain that seemed to be the only other choice.

Steve didn’t catch what Sam did, but the TV screen lit up and there was Bucky sitting on a stool in freeze-frame. 

“You dork,” Sam said, “why are you wearing a Captain America shirt?”

“Is he really,” Steve said, peering closer. Sure enough, between the edges of the half-unzipped— hey, that was Steve’s hoodie— was the top of the roundel, distinctive and recognizable. He looked over at Bucky, who was grinning. 

“Wondered if they’d make me change,” he said. “But they must’ve thought it was as funny as I did.” He punched Steve’s arm lightly. “I’m the fan club founder, man.” He was still wearing the shirt, and Steve’s hoodie, and Steve wanted to wrap his arms around him and kiss that smug grin right off, but that wasn’t really something they did at this point in their relationship. 

“Dork,” Sam said fondly, and actually tousled Bucky’s hair as he handed the phone back. Bucky tolerated that better than he would have in the 40s, but then, his hair wasn’t so carefully styled now. Though he had it pulled back and it looked a lot less careless than usual. Oh— someone had probably done it for him, for the video. He couldn’t pull it back one-handed.

 

The video started playing, and onscreen Bucky took a breath and looked up straight into the camera. He was next to one of the big windows down in the common area, Steve thought; the wall was featureless, but the light fell strong and clean-white from one side, and picked out his eyes beautifully, though it showed the shadows under them perhaps too clearly. 

A subtitle appeared. _LIVING PROOF_ , it said. 

“Go on,” Natasha said, offscreen. 

Bucky sucked his lower lip into his mouth, darted his eyes away from the camera (most likely toward Natasha), then dropped his gaze toward the floor and said, in a rush, “James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant, 32577038.” He flinched microscopically, then looked back up at the off-camera person and bit his lip again. “But uh. Used to be called Bucky.” He squinted, almost like he expected someone to hit him. 

There was a brief cut, and it came back to him in the same position but a little less hunched, a little more relaxed. “Well,” he said. “I lost my phone in the armed standoff.” He made a rueful face, glanced at the camera and quirked his eyebrows, made a what-can-you-do expression. “Like ya do, right? They confiscated it with any weapons I had on me and locked it up somewhere. But it’s not like I’d’a used it. I was kinda busy almost dyin’.”

“What happened to you?” Natasha asked, off-camera, dispassionate. 

He rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced. “So they put this metal arm on me,” he said, “because my real arm got ripped off or something, I don’t know, I don’t remember it really. And they had it set up so that if I didn’t get maintenance on it— like if I’d gone rogue, like I did— there was a thing in it that would… well, kill me. And it was. It was leaking this stuff into my blood. I can’t describe how bad it hurt. But the whole point was that I couldn’t survive without them fixing it.”

“Would you have gone back to them, to save your life?” Natasha asked. 

He shook his head emphatically, then winced visibly as it hurt his injured collarbone. “No,” he said. “I knew when I left that there was probably something like that. I always knew my time was short. I wasn’t gambling on getting help in time. For all I knew, it was a bomb that’d kill me instantly.”

“You’d rather have died horribly,” Natasha said. 

“When you got a choice like that,” Bucky said,  “to die horribly or live horribly, you pick the one that’s gonna take less time, right? Wouldn’t you? That’s not crazy, to choose that.”

There was another quick cut, and he was leaning back a little on the stool, the view zoomed out— you could see his one knee pulled up, could see he was in jeans. “Yeah,” he said, eyes downcast, thoughtful. “I got my phone back and I been online. I made ‘em show me all those videos. I been readin’ what people said.” He ran his tongue over his teeth in his closed mouth, a nervous mannerism Steve remembered from childhood. “Lot of people say I’m a traitor and a criminal and, and that.” His mouth worked, pulling his lower lip in and letting it slide out between his teeth. “And I’m, I mean, I did awful stuff. I don’t— I remember some of it, not all yet, but I get more back all the time. And there was this  one commenter that stuck out, some lady, I think it was a lady, it’s hard to tell— Internet, y’know?—  she said _you monster_ , y’know, _how can you sleep at night_ , and I, you know. I don’t write back. If I start I won’t ever stop. And I don’t. But I wanted to.”

He looked up at the camera under lowered eyebrows, exhaustion carved in every angle of his expression. “Because _lady_. You think I _do_?”

The camera lingered a moment, and then there was another cut. 

The camera was closer in again, and he was looking down. He glanced up at the off-camera person, and smiled a little, but it was a bitter smile. “I don’t know what people think I shoulda done,” he said. “I guess they think I didn’t try. I don’t remember a lot of it, but I know I fought for literally years.” 

He made a disgusted face. “I couldn’t remember what I was fighting about most of the time, I just did.” The camera angle changed slightly, a brief cut. He waved a hand next to his head, smiling grimly. “But what it was, was that little part of me that always reminded me to fight, that’s how long it took that part to regenerate. If they let me go too long, if they let my brain heal too much, they knew it’d come back. So I don’t know how many times it happened, but I know it happened often enough that they’d worked it out to the hour, if not the minute.”

He laughed at something, probably someone’s expression. “When you don’t have normal memory, what you _do_ have ties itself to things, to cues and feelings and smells, and movement and things.” He gestured vaguely. “Memory isn’t just in the mind, it’s in the body, and they couldn’t touch the memories in my body. Just my head.”  

 The camera shifted and he was looking at the floor, looking troubled. “I so clearly remember the feeling, like this light went off in my head, and I thought, _oh, I’m gonna [——] ‘em up now_. I had no idea why, I just knew— these guys I’d been following around meek as a lamb because they were telling me what to do and I was trained to listen— all of a sudden I was just going berserk on them, and I didn’t remember why, I just remembered that I _had_ to.”

 There was a brief cut, and he was shaking his head, mouth twisting in bitter amusement. “But these people are like, you should’ve fought back, and I just wonder, like, what do you think I did? You really think they’d bother coming up with all those control mechanisms for somebody who _never fought back_?” He looked straight into the camera for that last sentence. 

There was another cut, and he was looking toward the window now, looking into the light. He swallowed, set his mouth. “If it was just that I was unstable,” he said, “if it was that I flipped out and killed people at random, why would they keep me?” He looked over toward the camera, not quite at it. “If the arm was that amazing a piece of work, they coulda put it on somebody else.” He looked almost wistful.

Another cut, and he was looking straight at the camera, which was zoomed in much closer so that his face nearly filled the frame, his face and one shoulder, and the tip of the Captain America logo. “They’re posting these things because they’re still comin’ after me,” he said, impassive. “I remember more than they thought I would, I know incriminating things. They want to discredit me, want to limit the damage I can do to them.” He smiled slightly. “Because I’m living proof of what kind of monsters they are, I’m the worst monster they ever made. And I remember names, I remember faces. I can trace them back. They’ll do anything to discredit me, to destroy me. To stop me from destroying them. I don’t care about revenge, but I want them stopped.”

The video ended on his solemn, determined expression. 

 

“Wow,” Sam said, “that was good.” He put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “You’re— you got a good mouth on you.”

“Usually people don’t say that kind of thing for that kind of reason,” Bucky said, flippant and smirking and _oh_. He was _flirting_. Steve swallowed hard. That was Old Bucky, right down to the core. 

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Do they not,” he said slowly. 

Bucky looked thoughtful, deliberately curling his lower lip into his mouth and licking it mesmerizingly. Oh, he knew precisely what he was doing, and Steve watched Sam’s eyes helplessly drawn to that mouth. He squashed an unexpectedly arousing vision of what the two of them would look like together— where had _that_ come from? “Naw,” Bucky drawled. “Usually they got other things to say about my mouth.”

“You are trouble _all over_ ,” Sam said, laughing, and threw the dishtowel at his head. “Oh my _god_.”

Bucky pulled the dishtowel down around the back of his neck and grinned up innocently. “I am the epitome of good behavior,” he said. That, that face, _that_ was what made Steve twitch with the suppressed urge to pull him in and kiss the hell out of him.

“You’d think,” Sam said, leaning over and stealing the towel back with a flick, “in all the hours and hours of stories Steve told all of us about Saint Bucky, he could have mentioned maybe once what a heap of trouble you are.” 

“Saint Bucky,” Bucky laughed. “Steve Rogers doesn’t lie, he couldn’t possibly have made me sound that good.”

“Steve Rogers lies like a rug,” Sam said, absolutely radiant with amusement. “Steve Rogers lies like a _dog_.”

“I do not,” Steve said, unable not to grin at how beautiful Sam was, how beautiful they _both_ were. “I told you he was trouble.”

“Ha,” Sam said. He peeked into the oven and said, “Go wash your hands and come back and get your drinks, supper’s in like two minutes.”

“I don’t know what we’re gonna do when you go,” Steve said morosely, in a moment, looking at the glorious spread of food as he set the table. Sam had researched recipes based on Steve’s fumbling recall of foods they’d used to like, and tonight was an updated version of steak and kidney pie (this one featured mushrooms instead of kidneys).

The issue was that Bucky had very little appetite and had difficulty all around with eating, starting with his damaged teeth making chewing difficult, and ending with the sheer amount of scar tissue in his intestines making digestion difficult. He was healing, and said testily that this was nothing compared to how he used to be, but he still didn’t _like_ to eat. And nothing Steve knew how to make was all that tempting. Without Sam, Steve knew Bucky would probably subsist entirely off the joyless supplements the doctor had sent up. 

But for Sam, Bucky would eat. He came in drying his hand on his shirt and made something of a production out of sniffing the air. “That smells really good,” he said. 

“It’s supposed to be like something your mom used to make,” Steve said. 

Bucky considered that. “Doesn’t smell familiar,” he said, “but then, my mom wasn’t that great a cook.”

“She made good soup,” Steve said. 

“That she did,” Bucky said, “but other than that, I mean, I learned everything I knew from Nora Murphy. That woman could cook.”

“Oh yeah,” Steve said. “Nora Murphy.” Getting invited over there for dinner had always been a highlight. Not only because Jack and Nora’s kids loved Bucky so hilariously, hero-worshippingly much.

Sam put a hand on his hip. “You gonna compare me to some ol’ white lady from ancient times?” he asked. 

Bucky blinked, and Steve grimaced; Sam was usually better about that kind of thing. “Oh yeah,” Bucky said, a little blankly. “She was maybe forty last I saw her but that was… Yeah, she’s more than old, she’s a dead white lady now.” He looked thoughtful. “Shit, her _kids_ might even be dead by now.”

“Aw,” Sam said, contrite, “I put my foot right in that one.”

Bucky shrugged. “Don’t think anybody’s mad I missed the funeral,” he said, and scootched in to sit in the chair against the wall. He put his napkin into his lap. “I flatter myself, with the equipment you got here, I could probably do okay at cooking.”

“Is it really that different?” Sam asked skeptically. 

“You got four burners,” Bucky said, “you got an oven that probably keeps temperature within like a hundred degrees, you got a refrigerator, you got an electric toaster, you got a microwave which I don’t even know what makes those work, as far as I’m concerned that’s just a magic box—“

“Wait wait,” Sam said, cutting into the pie, “refrigerator— they didn’t have those? I thought they invented those in like, 1900.”

“They were invented,” Steve said, “we just didn’t have one.”

“Right, right, because you guys were poor,” Sam said, rolling his eyes a little.

“We wasn’t poor,” Bucky said, sitting up straighter and frowning indignantly. “We wasn’t rich neither but we wasn’t poor, Stevie, I don’t know what you been tellin’ people. My folks had a _car_. It’s just that refrigerators weren’t real common yet.”

“You wasn’t poor,” Sam said, amused. 

“We wasn’t,” Bucky said stubbornly, doubling down on the Brooklyn like he did sometimes now. No, he’d done that before too. He could talk with perfect upper-middle-class region-free grammar when he wanted, had always been able to— he could do a convincing Midwestern accent too—  but when he didn’t feel like it he wouldn’t. “I was never outta work, and maybe it was tight when Steve was in school but he always worked at least odd jobs. There was always money.”

“We were short sometimes,” Steve pointed out. “My medical bills were expensive, among other things.”

“Yeah okay sometimes there wasn’t _enough_ money,” Bucky amended. He held out his plate and Sam put a rather ambitiously-large piece of pie on it, which he regarded skeptically. “But there _was_ always money.”

“I get it,” Sam said, “I do.” 

Bucky waited politely until everyone was served. Even before, he’d never liked to be the first to eat; now he still had moments where he didn’t seem certain whether he was meant to partake or not. At the moment his greatest difficulty seemed to be that he wasn’t used to having one hand.

Steve dug in without hesitation— a few years now in this new body and he still wasn’t used to how hungry he got— and stopped, midway through chewing the first bite. 

“Holy shit,” he said. “This is amazing.”

Sam chewed thoughtfully. “Turned out okay,” he said. “I’ll keep this one.”

“Shyeah,” Bucky said, “this is like a thousand times better than Ma’s steak and kidney nonsense.” He was eating at a respectable pace, not as fast as Steve or even Sam, but better than he normally managed. 

Steve inhaled his first helping and took a second piece— he was pretty much over being embarrassed about eating so much, and was getting pretty good at estimating how much he’d need and planning accordingly, even though the hunger still surprised him. Bucky was still working steadily at his first piece. He paused, though, and dug his phone out of his pocket. 

“We don’t text at the table,” Sam said, sounding for all the world like the dad in a sitcom. 

“Some of us are wanted fugitives,” Bucky said, unconcerned, frowning at his phone, “and in the midst of a massive Internet smear campaign, so some of us need to keep up on things.” He set the phone down, shaking his head slightly. “Tony wants me to come down to his lab right away.”

“Not until you finish your dinner, young man,” Sam said disapprovingly. 

Bucky gave him a look. “Like I’m going to run out the door and leave this. Fuck that, Stark can wait. He’ll probably have forgotten what he wants with me by the time I get down there even if I do hurry, so I’m not gonna knock myself out.”

Sam laughed hard enough that he had to set his fork down for a minute. “How do you know Tony that well?” he asked.

Bucky blinked, and went briefly blank again— it was the clearest artifact left of his Winter Soldier conditioning, that he forgot to have facial expressions when he was thinking about too many other things at once. “I don’t,” he said in a moment, sounding troubled. 

“He’s not much different from Howard,” Steve said. “I mean. Okay. He is, but there’s a lot that’s similar.”

“I liked Howard,” Bucky said, and picked up his fork, resuming his dogged progress through his food. 

Steve looked over at Sam, making a wry face. “He was a decent fellow,” Steve said. “Or so I thought. I can’t understand how he wound up turning for HYDRA.”

Bucky frowned at him. “He didn’t.”

Steve blinked. “If he was working on the Winter Soldier project,” he said, but stopped. Bucky was shaking his head slightly, as much as he could move with his bad shoulder.

“I mean, I don’t know for sure,” Bucky said, “but I’m like ninety percent certain that at that point I was under the auspices of SHIELD, technically.”

Steve stared at him. “There’s literally no way Howard wouldn’t have recognized that you were James Barnes,” he said. “There’s no way he wouldn’t have figured out that something really fishy was going on.”

Bucky shrugged. “I don’t think he knew,” he said. 

“How could he not?” Steve demanded. “A brainwashed cyborg with the face of Captain America’s best friend?”

Bucky shook his head, unconcerned. “He never saw my face,” he said. “I don’t think he ever laid eyes on me directly. Hell, I’d wager he had no idea I was even human. I think they only told him about the cyborg part.” 

Steve blinked, considering that. “But it was— there’s a neural interface into your spine and your brain,” he said. “How could he have missed that those were human body parts?”

“Oh,” Bucky said, “he knew _that_ , but— you know, right after I got out, after I pulled you out of the river and all?” Steve nodded. “I tracked down a tech to fix my arm, because you’d fucked it up pretty good. And so I abduct this tech and break into a lab and she’s convinced I’m just going to murder her, right?”

“That sounds like a hot date,” Sam commented. 

“Oh yeah,” Bucky said. He was nearly finished with everything on his plate, which was an accomplishment, especially with all the talking. “So I tell her, look, I promise I won’t kill you. And she comes back, since she’s kind of not stupid, and says you don’t know what a promise is, it’s not in your programming. And I didn’t have a whole lot that I’d figured out by that point, but I knew I was a person, I knew my name and I’d been to look at that exhibit, I knew who I was supposed to have been. So I told her, I’m more than my programming. And she kind of laughs at me, like she doesn’t want to have to be the one to tell me, right? and is like, look man, you’re a robot, that’s really all you’ve got.”

“She thought you were a robot,” Sam said. 

Bucky nodded. “She said to me, actually said this verbatim: your biological components were all salvage.” He shook his head, wondering. “She really thought that I was like a Frankenstein monster with robotics and body parts and a computer or something for a brain.”

“Huh,” Steve said, frowning. 

“Oh yeah,” Bucky said. “So I said, no, I was a person, a whole person, and I rattled off some of the things I remembered, and she kind of went white and got real biddable and fixed me up. And at the end she said, you know, I had no idea, I really thought you were what they told us you were.”

“Really,” Sam said. 

“Really,” Bucky said. “I bet you anything most of the lower-level people who knew about me thought that’s what I was. I mean, anyone who wasn’t real high-up couldn’t have known that the tech isn’t even that advanced now. Hell, you see that arm, it doesn’t take much for you to believe the rest of me was built too. I know I thought I was a robot for a good while, I can’t blame people who aren’t me for thinking the same thing. Howard probably thought I was some sort of cyborg robot thing. You know how he got. He was there for the servos and the hookups, he never even looked over to see what it was attached to. It’s not like I _spoke_ to him.” He uttered this last as if it were a ridiculous concept to even contemplate.

“So you really think he wasn’t HYDRA,” Steve said, following a little dumbfoundedly. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “I do.” 

He looked at Sam, who looked solemnly back. “You probably ought to tell Tony that,” Sam said calmly. “He’s… probably upset, you know?”

Bucky stopped chewing and looked thoughtful a moment, and then his eyes widened and he said “Jesus fuckin’ _wept_ , I _am_ a fuckin’ robot, how did I not even _think_ of that?”

“It’s okay,” Sam said, “you’ve been distracted.”

“Jesus,” Bucky said, and rubbed his face. He looked resolutely at the last of the food on his plate. “Okay. I hate to eat and run, especially when the food’s so good, but I’m gonna finish this and go.”

“Yeah, okay,” Sam said. 

“You want one of us to come with you?” Steve asked. 

Bucky looked over at his phone. “Nah,” he said. “I got a map. I can get there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Steak and mushroom pie](http://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/96746661889/steak-mushroom-pie-recipe).


	5. Hand Of Doom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony teaches Bucky about Black Sabbath, and accidentally about Judas Priest and perhaps more information than anyone strictly needed about the aesthetics of the Winter Soldier's costuming.  
> And in which Sam and Bucky snuggle. 
> 
> Warnings for mentions of gore, very indirectly-implied past possible non-con/objectification, and brief but vivid hallucinations of bodily harm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah I'm deviating from my usual update schedule because I wrote this chapter ages ago and I've been dying to post it ever since. I don't know why but I love Bucky and Tony interacting.
> 
> Lyrics from Black Sabbath's "Hand of Doom", in case that wasn't evident. I'm discovering these artists as Bucky does, actually; it's not that I didn't ever listen to music but I have been deliberately seeking things out for the purposes of these stories. What should I do next? I just listened to Sleep's "Dopesmoker" twice for ostensible research but I dunno how to make a compelling scene to that one. Maybe Bucky needs to discover roots country or something. Townes Van Zandt? Or maybe Nirvana or something. Grateful Dead. We'll see.

_What you gonna do? Time's caught up with you_  
 _Now you wait your turn, you know there's no return_  
 _Take your written rules, you join the other fools  
_ _Turn to something new, now it's killing you_

 

Tony didn’t hear Barnes come in, because he was listening to Black Sabbath’s album _Paranoid_ on full-volume. He was in a bit of a zone, chasing down inspiration and hammering out the problem of the interface of the sensors with the neural transmitters by completely ignoring the entire problem and working on something else (an idea he had for a very small reactor to power just the prosthetic, much smaller than the one for the Iron Man suits, a miniaturized miniature arc reactor, which was still ridiculously overkill but that was kind of his signature style), and he was absently air-guitaring to the really good part of “Hand of Doom” ([dundundundundundundun DUN DUH DUN] _oh yoooooouuuu_ [chung chung chung chung] _you know you must be blind_ [dun DUH duh] _to dooooooo_ [chung chung chung chung] _something like thi-i-is_ ) when he happened to turn and Barnes was standing _right fucking there_ and he yelped and leapt three feet straight up. 

Barnes was doing an incredibly alarming crazy-eyed stare, and Tony thought belatedly that he might have overestimated how well the guy was recovering and maybe shouldn’t have arranged to meet him alone in a remote location during non-business hours, when Barnes spoke. 

“What _is_ this,” he said, wide-eyed. 

“What,” Tony said, really alarmed. Barnes gestured vaguely, and Tony realized he must mean the music. “Uh,” he said. “Black Sabbath.”

Barnes blinked, cutting his eyes slightly sideways in thought, then snapping his unnerving gaze right back onto Tony’s face. “Black Sabbath,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “What year? What genre? I can’t place it.”

“Uh,” Tony said. The Winter fucking Soldier was staring at him like prey and interrogating him about classic metal. This was his life. “Uh, like, early 70s probably? This is like their second or third album?”

“What _is_ it, though,” Barnes said, insistent.

“Uh,” Tony said, completely taken aback. “Well. It’s metal. They kind of— it’s one of the first metal albums ever.”

“Metal,” Barnes said, frowning. 

“Heavy metal,” Tony said. “Subgenre of rock and roll, later expanded into all kinds of sub-subgenres like hair metal and speed metal and thrash metal and death metal and so on and so forth.”

Barnes was listening intently. “It sounds,” he said, but didn’t finish the sentence. 

“If you haven’t heard it,” Tony said, “this isn’t the song to start with. You need the album’s title track.” He skipped back to “Paranoid” and watched Barnes’ face for a reaction. 

Barnes stood stock-still, distant-eyed, for the entire track. _Can you help me occupy my brain?_ Ozzy sounded more plaintive than usual in this context. As the last riff faded out Tony raised both eyebrows. 

Barnes blinked, looked up at him, and said, “Okay, a lot of shit makes a lot more sense now.”

“Shit like what?” Tony asked. 

“Like, music,” Barnes said. “Like, other more recent bands. I get it now.”

Tony laughed. “Does that happen a lot?” he asked, interested. “That you miss things and have to fill it in?”

“Course it does,” Barnes said. He took a step back and looked at Tony’s shirt. Oh. The arc reactor. It tended to be disconcerting to people who weren’t used to it. A lot of people assumed it was just a design on the shirt. “I tried, like, looking up top-fifty lists and whatever and they’re just all the fuckin’ Beatles, which doesn’t do a damn thing to explain where the fuck,” he gestured vaguely, mildly frustrated, “fuckin’, _Tool_ came from.”

“Oh my God, don’t bother with Tool.” Despite the ridiculously, intricately painful, complications, Tony kind of liked this kid. “Sam has a whole carefully-curated collection he’s put together for Steve,” he said, turning back to the reactor he’d been working on. It looked pretty stable, which pleased him enormously.

“I know,” Barnes said. “I been cribbing from that plenty. There wasn’t any Black Sabbath in it, though.”

“Metal is kind of… white people music,” Tony said. “Like, even more so than the Beatles.”

“I’ll give him shit for it later,” Barnes said. “It’s hard to find stuff to give Sam shit about. I save it up.”

“To be honest,” Tony said, “you kind of look like a metalhead. Maybe he was just assuming you already knew.” He gestured, called up a hologram terminal, pulled up an image search for “metalhead”, reconsidered, searched for images of “judas priest” instead. Talk about iconic. Also ironic. How many metalheads never realized that those studded leather jackets were a gay subculture thing? It was genius-level trolling, was what it was. 

Barnes focused on the holographic display without difficulty, and swore. “Well,” he said. “Whoever designed the latest version of my tac gear was a metalhead, anyway.”

“Either that or a leather daddy,” Tony said. 

Barnes frowned, and called up a keyboard on the terminal— how did he know how to do that? He had it configured to be one-handed, too. JARVIS must like him. No fair. Tony realized with alarm that Barnes was searching the term “leather daddy”. 

“No no no,” Tony said, “no, that’s _not_ a safe for work term,” but Barnes had already entered the query. 

“Jesus,” Barnes said, looking distressed as a veritable buffet of lurid images came up. Tony _never_ let JARVIS use SafeSearch. He hadn’t anticipated that this would be when it bit him on the ass. “Oh— oh Jesus. It’s a sex thing. It’s, that’s _gotta_ be a sex thing.” 

“Close that window,” Tony said, and for a wonder, JARVIS actually listened to him instead of his new brain-damaged boyfriend.

Barnes was making a sort of pathetic face. “That’s a _thing_ ,” he said, a little forlornly.

“It is,” Tony said. “It’s, uh. I didn’t mean that.”

Barnes sighed. “It explains a lot, though,” he said, and rubbed his face. “Fuck. I _guess_ I’m better off knowin’ that.” He didn’t sound convinced.

“I don’t know,” Tony said. A little hopefully, he added, “Why, see anything you like?”

Barnes gave him a heavy-eyed, weary look. “I had already picked up on the fact that at least one of my handlers had a robot fetish,” he said, looking utterly disgusted. “I didn’t really need to know that the entire fucking _outfit_ was on-theme.”

Tony stared at him in dismay, then closed his eyes. He’d read the goddamn files. Barnes would’ve been completely at the mercy of his handlers, without even the capacity to understand what was going on. That was horrifying enough without getting into the fact that he was, okay, he was a pretty attractive guy even when beat to shit. (Tony was mostly-with-occasional-mutually-agreed-upon-arrangements-monogamous, not _blind_ , and if he’d thought Rogers had a pretty mouth, Barnes here was some _next-level_ shit _._ Though, between the two of them, who had better thighs was—) “Okay,” Tony said, interrupting his own train of thought, “okay, okay, I rarely say this, but I regret this conversation.”

“You and me both, pal,” Barnes said. “Should we get on to why you called me down here?”

Tony clapped his hands together, then rubbed them. “Yes,” he said, pointing at Barnes, “yes, that is exactly what we should do.” He turned to his workbench, and gestured. Barnes followed. He was disarmingly normal like this, missing arm hidden under a bulky bright-blue hoodie, wearing jeans that looked like the Black Widow had probably bought them because they had a very flattering fit behind (because _really_ , it wasn’t just his mouth that was pretty— _Tony no_ ), and with his feet actually bare. Probably should get that boy some shoes, it wouldn’t do for people to think Tony was keeping him in squalor, nobody had ever had reason to accuse Tony of poor hospitality even when it wasn’t so much hospitality as protective custody. 

“Okay,” Tony said. “So. Distressed as I was to discover that my father was a fucking Nazi, and doubly distressed as I was to realize that his secret notes are so secret I’m pretty sure I’ll never find them, I have been doing a pretty bang-up job, if I do say so myself, at reverse-engineering this thing.”

“Oh,” Barnes said, and Tony paused and gave him a look; he didn’t like stopping mid-tirade, but Barnes had kind of a crazy-eyes look again, so maybe he’d make an exception.

“What,” Tony said patiently. 

“Howard wasn’t HYDRA,” Barnes said, all in a rush. 

Tony blinked. “There’s not really any way he wasn’t,” he said. “If he mentioned me to you, well, I was born almost thirty years after you quote-unquote died, buddy.”

“He didn’t know,” Barnes said. “He didn’t know about me.”

“And yet, he was in the room with you?” Tony raised an eyebrow. “Come now.”

Barnes shook his head emphatically, then paused, grimacing, and Tony remembered suddenly that the guy was wandering around with some pretty severe broken bones in his shoulder and probably shouldn’t be gesticulating wildly. “No. He didn’t know. Look, it’s not the clearest section of my memory, but I remember it because I recognized him. And I didn’t recognize people. So I was paying attention. But he didn’t recognize me. I was watching him, sorta hopin’ he would, see? But he didn’t. And I think, now, that I had something over my face. I think they were hiding me from him, is the thing.”

“Okay,” Tony said, skeptical. “But he knew he was building a robot arm to put onto a supersoldier.”

“No,” Bucky said. “I don’t even think he knew that much. I think whoever was in charge of my project by then, they probably thought it was fucking hilarious to bring Howard in and have him, this genius, not know that the guy he was working on was someone he knew. Right? That’s HYDRA _all_ the fuck over, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Tony said slowly. “But the thing is— I mean, Howard _was_ a genius.”

“Oh,” Barnes said, “I’m not disputing that. Listen, though. The files on me, the internal files, the ones that a lot of the techs and so on who worked on me could see— those all made it sound like I was a cyborg, like I had never actually been a living human, or that I’d died, at least, and was just— salvage. The last tech I worked with, I made her fix my arm at gunpoint after the Insight fiasco, and I don’t think she was lying, she really didn’t know that I’d ever been anything that could remember being human.”

“There’s no way,” Tony said, frowning. “We don’t have the technology to do that now, Howard wouldn’t have been simple enough to believe they did in the 70s.” 

Barnes tilted his head, a remarkably shrug-like gesture— it was probably the closest he could manage— and said, “I don’t know what they told him. But from the way he talked— and here’s the other thing, Stark, I was under paralysis the whole time he worked on me. He’d built most of that stuff elsewhere, and was only in my presence the one time. I had a thing on my face, I was paralyzed— he had no idea I was even alive, no idea I was aware. Certainly no idea I could hear him, could feel everything he was doing.”

Tony closed his eyes and rubbed his face with both hands. “Jesus,” he said, trying to scrub away that mental image, of his father obliviously working on— “God, Barnes, I can’t even—“

“I know,” Barnes said miserably, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything in the first place.” 

Tony opened his eyes, suddenly sick with anger. “That is _not_ what is wrong here,” he said, and Barnes flinched back. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re the _only_ one in this situation who didn’t do anything wrong.”

Barnes stared at him blankly, and Tony realized belatedly that perhaps shouting at the man wasn’t the best idea. And Christ, he _did_ look like a robot. “Barnes,” he said, softer, “you didn’t— you’re not wrong. I would have figured it out anyway. Look.” He turned back to the workbench, picked up one of the little components. “Look. This is labeled. It’s fucking _labeled_. It’s StarkTech. There’s no way I wasn’t going to see that. Don’t hide my father’s sins from me. Don’t make excuses for him.”

Barnes still had no expression whatsoever, but he said, tonelessly, eyes downcast, “Howard didn’t know.” There was something, despite his flatness, almost mulish in his stance and bearing; he’d had defiance ripped forcibly and repeatedly out of him but he was still stubborn as fuck. He looked up about level with Tony’s chest, and said, “I don’t know you well enough to bother lying to you.”

“I didn’t mean to yell,” Tony said. At that, Barnes raised his eyes to meet his gaze briefly. 

“Okay,” he said, and looked back down. He was still expressionless, though, muted and closed-off, and Tony regretted his outburst. 

Tony composed himself, breathed in, breathed out. No help for it, and he had plenty of experience with blowing right past his fuck-ups, so here goes. “So,” he said. “I have questions about the neural interface. I’ve pieced together most of how it works on the transmitting end, but I don’t understand the receivers that well. I kind of yanked it all out in a terrible hurry, and I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to what happened once there was nothing connected. I assume the receivers are inactive, since the transmitting end isn’t sending any data?”

“No,” Barnes said, “they’re definitely still firin’ away in there.”

Tony stared at him. “I was sort of afraid of that,” he said grimly, grabbing for a scanner and gesturing at Barnes to sit on the workbench. “But you didn’t say anything— aren’t they driving you crazy?”

Barnes looked at him from under lowered eyebrows as he hopped up obediently and took a seat, feet swinging. “You hit a point,” he said, “where you’re so crazy already that it really doesn’t fuckin’ matter. Yeah, they’re firing pretty much constantly, it’s real annoying, and the fact that it’s a limb that isn’t fuckin’ there is really distracting, but in case you forgot, I’m also batshit insane so it’s not like anybody’s going to notice.”

“What does it feel like?” Tony asked, unwittingly fascinated as he stared at the scanner: yeah, there was a whole bunch of electrical activity in that bit of Barnes’s brain. Well, shit. He pulled up a schematic of the arm and tried to mentally connect the receivers with where the transmitters should have been.

“It fuckin’ hurts,” Barnes said, “what do you think it feels like?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Tony said, narrowing his eyes at him. 

Barnes breathed in, then out slowly. “It’s like static, and like being rubbed in the same spot with sandpaper over and over and over, and like having little nails poke you, all at once, nonstop. Sometimes there’s a spike like somebody’s goin’ at it with a knife. Now you know.”

“And you never mentioned this,” Tony said. “What’s your deal?”

“It pretty much felt like that when there was an arm there too,” Barnes said. “Nobody cared then, I kinda got used to it. And, you know, the novelty of painkillers. As long as I’m high as fuck, it’s not so bad.”

“It felt like that before?” Tony asked. “See, that’s what I couldn’t work out— I feel like the neural interface was never that good. So you’re saying it really never felt natural.”

“No,” Barnes said. “Not at all. I hate it.” 

Tony blinked in surprise. “An opinion!” he said. “See, I knew you had them. I knew you had feelings about things. So you hated the old arm. Because it hurt you?” He turned the schematic hologram so it faced Barnes. 

“It was heavy,” Barnes said, “and it hurt all the time, and it made _noise_ , and I didn’t _want_ it.” The outburst seemed to exhaust him, and he rocked backward a little, looking down at the floor again. He chewed on his lower lip, and said, softer as if he were apologizing, “It had really good positional awareness, and decent tactile feedback. But there was a lot of extraneous signal. Like if I wore a sleeve over it, it was just this constant irritation. A couple of times I went berserk and tried to get it off me. I miss it now that it’s not there, it was a lot better than nothing, but I never much liked it.” 

“So even if I did have Howard’s secret notes,” Tony said, “I wouldn’t really want to use his design anyway.” 

Bucky tilted his head again, looked uncertain. “I mean,” he said. “It’s better than anything else anyone’s ever made, probably.”

“Yes but that doesn’t make it good _enough_ ,” Tony said. “But I guess my most urgent task is that I’ve got to shut down the receivers. I can’t leave them just firing randomly in your head.”

Barnes gave him a wary look. “You’re not goin’ in there with pliers,” he said, putting his hand to his head— unerringly, to the place where the receivers were hard-wired in. Oh, right, he’d been conscious for the surgery, and that was fucking awful to contemplate. So of course he knew where they were. 

“No,” Tony said, “I don’t do surgery. I’m never working directly on you again unless we get decent anaesthetic and a surgical team to do the actual blood parts of it.”

“I like the idea of the arm comin’ off,” Barnes agreed. “Like, you build it over there, and then somebody who knows how to do that installs the attachment thing, and that’s that. And if it needs to be different, you can take it off and work on it and I don’t even have to be in the room.”

“Yep,” Tony said. “We’re doing it that way. Hell, I could build you a different one for different days of the week and you could keep them in your closet and switch ‘em out. Buuuut… it’s going to take me a while to design and build the first one, before I get into that kind of thing.”

“And it’s gonna take a while to get the shit all grafted on that’s gotta be there,” Barnes said, looking uncomfortable. “Including if you gotta upgrade the receivers in…” He touched his head again, and grimaced. “Okay, I don’t care about the anaesthesia much for most of it, but if you gotta go in my head I wanna be out. I don’t care if you gotta knock me out by shovin’ an ice pick up my nose or hittin’ me really hard or what, I don’t care, I just, I don’t ever want to feel ‘em peel my head open again. I just, that was the _worst_ thing.”

Tony stared at him. “I, you,” he said, and finally his brain caught up with his mouth and he said, softer, “Kid, we wouldn’t do that to you.” It was absurd to call this man ‘kid’, even though he looked maybe thirty, Tony knew that, but he couldn’t help it. 

Barnes looked down toward his dangling feet. “Like I said, I mostly don’t care.” He waved his hand at the schematics. “And I know it gets Steve upset but I don’t—“ He stopped, breathed, tried again. “It’s great that you have all these ideas, and it’d be real nice to have a working arm, especially if it didn’t fucking _hurt_ all the time, but really. I’m crazy and I’ve spent seventy-five years murdering people. Now, murdering people, singly or in groups or by stealth or by brute force, is my one marketable skill, and I’m _real_ good at it, so I can see wanting me to get back into that business, but absent a solid plan for managing that career, it seems a little rash to kit me out with a super-advanced killing machine.” 

“My next-door neighbor is the Hulk,” Tony said dryly. “I’m not real worried about managing your murdering career. We managed to tame his issues, I’m betting we’ll get yours sorted out. Either way, that kind of thing isn’t my specialty. I don’t do HR, or PR. I design killing machines, it’s what I do, and I’ve learned a lot from yours and am just itching to redesign it. Do me a favor, and we’ll leave the issues-sorting to the issues-sorters, the legal ramifications to the lawyers and pencil-pushers, and we’ll just work on the design, implementation, and testing here, hm?”

Barnes stared at him. “I guess I should feel good that compared to you I’m barely even eccentric,” he said. “You? You’re nuts.”

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupted, and Tony turned back to the workbench. 

“Oh fuck,” he said. The tiny reactor was still running and was fluctuating, quite obviously not as stable as he’d initially thought. “Oh— oh _fuck_.”

“That’s a problem,” Barnes hazarded a guess, hopping down from the workbench.

“Yeah,” Tony said  tersely, and hastily pried out the fuel component, chucking it under the bench as it melted the pliers. “Uh, get out, _get out_ , it’s gonna— _fuck!_ —“ He threw his hands up and jumped back, not far enough, _shit_.

Barnes caught him by the back of the shirt and hauled him across the room faster than he could have jumped himself, but the explosion still caught them both. Barnes flung Tony on his way down, further out of the way of the blast. Tony wound up tangled in one of the robots, and Barnes hit the floor and rolled under a bench.

It wasn’t a particularly powerful explosion, since Tony had gotten the fuel component out in time. A little debris rained down, and that workstation was trashed, but no structural damage, nothing beyond a fairly small radius. “I’m okay,” he said, when he could breathe. Stuck, though. He wriggled futilely. “Barnes, you broken?”

“I’m oh—  okay,” Barnes said, a little breathless, and Tony squirmed around a little stab of guilt— the guy had a fair number of broken bones, getting blown across a room probably had hurt a lot. 

“Shall I summon medical assistance or disaster response teams?” JARVIS enquired politely. 

“No,” Tony said, “no, that would just be embarrassing. Barnes, are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” Barnes said, and shoved himself to a sitting position, gingerly rotating his neck. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Good,” Tony said. “Well, I’m stuck, so if you’re really okay, I’d appreciate a hand.” 

Barnes huffed out a noise that was almost a laugh, pushed to his feet, and came toward Tony, limping just a little. He bent over to look at where Tony was pinned upside-down and close to the ground. “Stuck, huh?”

“Well,” Tony said, wriggling a little, “if I took my pants off I could probably get myself out but I feel like I’ve done enough of that in this lifetime, I’d rather my remaining pantsless occasions be for better reasons and in, no offense, more particular company.”

“Oh,” Barnes said, “I’ve heard about you and your—” He looked up into Tony’s face, and then suddenly his expression shifted, went completely blank. 

“What,” Tony said, alarmed— was he impaled and hadn’t noticed, or something? No, he’d definitely— well, JARVIS would have said something. 

Barnes’s expression went past blank and into horrified. “Oh God,” he said, “no,” and staggered back, turning away, falling to his knees. “Oh God,” he said again, covering his face with his hand. 

“What,” Tony repeated, a little more worried. 

Barnes was shaking badly, staring at nothing. “No,” he whispered, to nobody, looking shocked and sick. 

“Shit, are you reliving ‘Nam?” Tony asked. 

“I’m sorry,” Barnes said, near tears and thickly horrified. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

“I know it was kind of a loud noise,” Tony said, “but for real, it’s okay, we’re okay, I just need you to get me out of this thing.”

“It was raining,” Barnes said, almost beseechingly, voice thin. “And dark. I remember now. It was me. I did it. I did it, Stark.” 

“No,” Tony said. “No, it was just an accident.” He probably knew what this was about and boy, he didn’t want to.

“I put an obstacle in the road that they wouldn’t see,” Barnes said, “not in the rain, in the dark— they hit it and flipped and then I went to— I checked the car—“

“Barnes,” Tony said, and he damn well knew what Barnes was talking about and desperately wanted him not to finish the story, “please, I know. Stop. It’s okay. Just don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.”

Barnes crawled toward him, hunched on his knees, bending to look up into his face. “He was hanging upside-down,” Barnes said hollowly, and Tony swallowed against nausea; _he_ was hanging upside-down, right now, like he would be in a flipped car. Barnes’s eyes were wide and terrified. “They were— the driver was dead already—“

“Barnes,” Tony said, begging now, “stop, please stop.” 

Barnes reached in, pressing his shoulder into Tony’s ribs to take his weight, surprisingly gentle for how hard he surely had to lean. It was an impressive feat of strength for a one-armed man, since he had to take all the weight at an angle balancing on his knees. Tony wasn’t a big dude, but neither was Barnes, really. He unhooked Tony’s waistband from the bolt where it was stuck, and untangled the tail of his shirt. “I snapped their necks,” Barnes said, nearly a whisper, moving mechanically, supporting Tony against his shoulder with his one arm, holding him gently so he didn’t land on his head, and backing out of the tangle of equipment. “She was groggy, she didn’t know, but he was hurt bad, he was awake, he saw me and screamed. I did it fast, Stark, I’m sorry.” 

He let Tony down onto the floor and sat like a puppet with its strings cut, covering his face with his hand, bent almost double. “I’m sorry,” he said again, looking away.

Tony lay where Barnes had put him down, profoundly disturbed. “I really, really wish you hadn’t told me the story,” he said finally. 

“I’m sorry,” Barnes said thickly, unmoving. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Tony said. “I’m gonna need a minute to handle it but it’s not your fault, Barnes.”

“I killed them,” Barnes said. 

“It’s okay,” Tony said, covering his face with his hands.

“Doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” Barnes said dully, not lifting his head. “I still fuckin’ did it. You got a right not to be a fan of me. You definitely got no call to be doin’ me favors.”

Tony rubbed his face and sat up. “I said I just need a minute, Barnes.”

Barnes nodded, wiped his face, and tried to get up, but apparently couldn’t; he rolled to his knees but stopped there, eyes closed, breathing hard, clearly in pain. If he couldn’t even shake his head, lifting Tony on his shoulder had probably hurt kind of a lot. He looked so young. It was ridiculous, and horribly unfair, and Tony really wanted to be angry at someone right now but there was no available target. 

Tony finally hauled himself to his feet and came to stand by Barnes. “C’mon,” he said, holding out his hand. Barnes blinked, looked at his hand, set his jaw and took it. He wasn’t all that heavy, comparatively, but he stumbled, off-balance and evidently light-headed, and Tony had to steady him on his feet. 

“You sure you didn’t get hurt?” Tony asked, not letting go of his right shoulder. 

“Was already hurt,” Barnes said, blinking hard. His eyes focused finally. “It’s fine.” 

Tony considered him for a long moment. “Give me a couple hours, I’ll have a solution for the neural implant issue, at least temporarily to stop the pain.”

Barnes’s eyes were downcast, submissive. “I owe you,” he said. “I’m obligated to you. If you have a use for me, I’m yours.”

“No,” Tony said, “pretty sure that’s not how this works, Barnes.”

Barnes flicked his gaze up to Tony’s, held it for a second. “No?” He looked back down and away. “Well, the fact remains, I’m in your debt.”

And that was the thing about Barnes, despite him being a crazy fucked-up popsicle— he was a good kid. Not the same kind of good as Steve Rogers, not nearly so wholesome and earnest, but good nonetheless, a savage kind of ruthless goodness that took no prisoners and brooked no opposition and did whatever it fucking took to get the right thing fucking _done_.

“I, it’s okay,” Tony said. “I mean, my dad fucking tortured you, because they thought it was funny, and then they sent you to kill him, because they thought it was funny. None of that’s your fault.”

Barnes nodded tightly, looking away, near tears. “He knew,” he said, with an air of revelation. “When he saw me— that’s why. It’s not that he was afraid of me, it’s that he knew what I was. He knew my arm and he knew my face and he figured it all out.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. Christ, that was completely fucking awful. “Just— don’t tell me any more details, okay?”

Barnes looked at him again, realization dawning across his face, then looked away again, embarrassed this time. “Fuck,” he muttered, “if I’d been thinkin’ straight I woulda shut my mouth. That was— I’m sorry. Just— I want you not to forget what I am, while you’re designing this arm thing.”

“Trust me,” Tony said, “I know.”

 

 

* * * 

 

The nightmares crowded in, and Bucky woke up thrashing, mute with horror— teeth, human teeth, everywhere, a mattress soaked in blood, jawbones, _human_ jawbones, red and bloody— he sobbed for breath, landed on the floor hard, shoved himself back against the wall and stared wildly around until the images faded and he could see where he was. 

_Murdered in their beds_ , the phrase floated by, and he let it go, staring blankly. He didn’t know what any of it was in reference to, whether he’d pulled all those teeth out or seen it done, he didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. 

He rolled unsteadily to his feet, and the phantom arm flared white-hot with pain and sent him back to his knees for a moment, trembling and gasping with it. He dug his fingers in under the biceps muscle of the arm stump, trying to overwhelm the phantom nerves with real pain. 

It took forever to die down enough for him to stand, but the advantage was that if the pain was bad enough he couldn’t really think about anything else, especially not a scattering of far more human teeth than had come out of one person. 

Remembering that little detail made him gag, and he barely made it to the bathroom before he threw up. There hadn’t been anything in his stomach, so not much happened, and he sat on the bathroom floor for a little while, thankful Steve kept the bathroom so clean. 

He stayed in there until the dry heaves stopped, then hauled himself shakily to his feet. He looked at his bedroom door, but it was dark and cavernous in there and he couldn’t face it. There was no way he was going to sleep any more tonight. He turned around and walked the other direction, and stood in the kitchen for a long time, trying to collect himself. His arm was hurting in hot-and-cold waves, sparking along where there was nothing there, and he leaned against the edge of the counter, bending over it. He needed another dose of pain meds and he didn’t want them. He didn’t want the fuzziness, the weird sense of dislocation, and he didn’t deserve the relief anyway.

Getting a glass of water was beyond him, so he turned the tap on and drank water from his cupped hand. It would have to do. He splashed his face, turned the tap off, and staggered into the living room, dizzy and sick and still lost in the horror of the dream. 

Because face it, that hadn’t been a dream, that had been a shard of memory, probably all that was left of that mission, and what else could it have been but something he’d done? He made it as far as the couch, sat heavily on it, then flinched violently away from the padded back of it (too enfolding, his body expected the restraints to snap out of it and hold him down), and sank down onto the floor, shuddering and shuddering. 

At least he hadn’t made any noise. He pulled his knees up and curled around the phantom pain, covering his head with his existing arm. Only… He peered at the clock on the entertainment center. Great. Only five more hours til anyone else woke up to distract him. No problem.

_You’re fucking pathetic, Barnes_ , he thought, not for the first time, and bit down hard on a fold of his shirt to stay silent, trying futilely to breathe through the pain as another wave seared up his missing arm. He managed not to whimper, a small hollow victory.

A light turned on; someone else going to the bathroom. Embarrassment warred with a desperate desire for company, for distraction maybe, and he bit down harder and squeezed his eyes shut so he wouldn’t make any noise.

After a long moment he heard footsteps. Wasn’t Steve, wrong cadence, wrong size. Shit, it was Sam, and he was gonna come over and be reasonable at Bucky, and Bucky was going to feel like an idiot. Sure enough—

“Jesus, Barnes, you sittin’ in the dark in here?” Sam’s voice was pitched low; Steve must be home and asleep. Bucky couldn’t remember. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, prying his teeth out of his shirt. He tried to sit up, to assume some kind of normal posture, look maybe a little less fucked-up, but it hurt too bad, so he gave up. There wasn’t really any way to salvage this so he didn’t seem like a total loser. 

Sam hesitated only a moment, backlit by the light down the hall, before he stepped into the room. “You’re not okay, huh?”

Bucky turned his head a little and regarded Sam plaintively from under the arm that was still over his head. “No,” he whispered, ashamed of himself; he didn’t deserve comforting for this but he didn’t have the strength to turn it down either.

Sam sighed, and came and sat down next to him, back pressed against the front of the couch. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’ve been doin’ real good, so it stands to reason you might have a rough night. Anything in particular?”

Bucky made an inarticulate noise and hid his face again. 

Sam slid a little closer along the couch. “Can I put my arm around you?” he asked. 

“Okay,” Bucky said, hating that he sounded like a little child. Sam slid closer, and very carefully pressed his side against Bucky’s, and put his arm around Bucky’s shoulders. Bucky pulled his arm down from over his head and breathed in slowly, trying to collect himself; it hitched at another jolt of pain. 

“Somethin’ spook ya, or are you in pain?” Sam asked, quiet and gentle. There was something so reassuring about him, so real— at least one of Bucky’s handlers, over the years, had broken him with false kindness; sometimes when people now tried to reassure him it scraped harsh over the memories of that man who would have him tortured and then gently reassure him, always the one to unfasten his bonds, always the one to soothe him, but in the end, really the one who had ordered all of it. And Bucky had known that, had known the price of the kindness, but he had been so desperate then, so absolutely starved for any acknowledgement of, not even his humanity, just his aliveness— anything at all— that he had drunk it up like a man dying of thirst drinking water he knew was poisoned, because he couldn’t take the thirst anymore.

But Sam, alone among those who wanted to help, didn’t remind him of that man. There was nothing cloying, nothing seductive in his kindness— it was real, it was true, and it was no-nonsense. And it was absolutely unwarranted. 

“Both,” Bucky managed. 

“I ain’t gonna lie to you and tell you there’s nothin’ to be scared of,” Sam said, and Bucky wondered if his memory of what it felt like to fall in love was accurate because this sure seemed familiar. “But maybe we can fix the pain thing. What hurts?”

Bucky shook his head. “Just the arm,” he said. “Like usual. Just, when there’s no distraction it’s worse.” He breathed in slow, held it, breathed out slow, and relaxed a little closer against Sam’s side. He shouldn’t, but he couldn’t _not_. “It’s better now than it was a minute ago.”

“I know we got more of that stuff that actually works on you,” Sam said. “I think Steve put it in the medicine cabinet. You want some? Might help you sleep?”

“No,” Bucky said, a little too sharply. “N— no. I’m good. Thanks.”

Sam was quiet a moment, regarding him steadily. “That’s it, is it? Bad dream?”

“They’re not dreams,” Bucky said. 

“No?” Bucky settled himself in closer to Sam, pulling his legs up as if he could curl into him even closer. Sam wasn’t the biggest guy, but he was only a little smaller than Bucky was now. He was probably about the size Bucky had been when he’d been a real person. He had to not say that last bit out loud, Sam would probably give him one of _those_ looks for it. Anyway, Sam was big enough to be comforting. Not as warm as Steve, then or now, but warm enough. Bucky was always cold, had always been but was even worse now. 

“You just goin’ back to sleep right here?” Sam asked, amused. Bucky made a quiet grumbling sound and wriggled himself into a position where he could put his head on Sam’s shoulder. Yeah, he didn’t deserve this, yeah it was presumptuous, yeah, the guy probably hadn’t intended on this, but he was a beacon of sanity and was also really hot and Bucky was just all out of shame, so. 

“Don’t know that I’ll ever sleep again,” Bucky said, “but if you’re just gonna sit there, I’m gonna take shameless advantage. Didn’t Steve warn you?”

“Steve told me all kinds of things about you but it’s impossible to tell which ones he kind of… embroidered,” Sam said. 

“Steve Rogers doesn’t _lie_ ,” Bucky answered, shooting for _mock-indignant_ and landing somewhere in _deranged_ , and Sam snorted eloquently, seeming to catch his meaning anyway. He could still see bloody detached human teeth if he closed his eyes, but he didn’t have to, he could just sort of unfocus them and look at the armchair, and that was okay. 

“I guess you don’t wanna talk about the bad not-dreams,” Sam said. 

“No shit,” Bucky said.

“Did you get sick? I thought I heard something like that,” Sam said. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “It was okay. It was reflex. I haven’t been having problems with food as much.”

“Just— got yourself worked up, huh?” Sam asked. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. The silence spun out comfortably for a few minutes, and some of the muscles in Bucky’s back unlocked a little, and the phantom limb pain died down to a steady grating hiss of sandpaper-rubbing. Finally he remembered it was the middle of the goddamn night and since Sam wasn’t in chronic pain, himself, this position was probably really uncomfortable relative to his former position of sleeping in his nice guest bed like a normal human. Bucky sighed, and reluctantly steeled himself to sit up. “I should let you go back to bed,” he said. “I’m okay now.”

“I’m only gonna accept okay as an option here if you really think you’re going to go back to sleep now,” Sam said. 

“Yeah,” Bucky lied nonchalantly, “I probably will.”

Sam’s silence spoke volumes. “Uh-huh,” he said slowly. “Because all you needed was like a minute and a half of snuggling to fix everything that had you curled up in a ball shaking on the living room floor in the middle of the night. I’ll buy that.”

Bucky made a noise that was, for him nowadays, pretty close to a laugh. “Wouldn’t it be nice if it worked, though?” he said wistfully, his shamelessness warring with his pride and winning handily. Shamelessness let him abandon his attempt to pull away, and sink his head back down against Sam’s solid shoulder.

“Yeah,” Sam said, “it would.”

The phantom pain spiked sharply for a second and he twitched, but got his breathing back under control, set his jaw and rode it out as it ebbed back down to the baseline irritation. 

“What’s hurting you?” Sam asked. “I felt that.”

“It’s the,” Bucky said. “The neural interface for the fake arm. Transmitters are gone but the receivers are still hard-wired in up top. With no inputs they just, it’s like, static, only it’s nerves.”

“Up top,” Sam said. “What, in your shoulder?”

“In my brain,” Bucky said. “My spine and my brain.”

“Jesus,” Sam said, “nobody told me you had receivers in your brain.”

“I’m state-of-the-art,” Bucky said drily.

“They can’t shut that down?” Steve asked.

“Tony said he could come up with something,” Bucky said. 

“So it just… hurts,” Sam said. “Just, intermittently, or…”

“Something like that,” Bucky said. 

“How long you think it’s gonna take Tony to shut ‘em off?” Sam asked. “Even if it’s only sometimes, that’s still a lot to have to go through.”

“He said he could figure it out pretty quick,” Bucky said. 

“When you say intermittent,” Sam said, “you mean, like, every few hours, every few minutes…” He trailed off, thinking. “Or you mean all the time, and you just don’t wanna say it.” 

Bucky didn’t answer. “Ah,” Sam said. “I see. You know, chronic pain is actually a really bad problem all around? You can’t heal, like, anything if you have that to contend with. We gotta make stopping that a priority.”

“Tony was working on it today,” Bucky said. “But his lab blew up.”

“It _what_ ,” Sam said, pulling away a little to look. Bucky sighed and sat up, regretting the loss of the physical contact, but resigned to it. 

“A, a thingy he was workin’ on,” Bucky said, “he stopped to talk to me and the thingy kind of overheated or something, and blew up. It wasn’t bad, but it was kind of distracting. Destroyed some stuff.” 

“I bet,” Sam said, and tugged him back close, settling down against the couch again.

“And I kind of,” Bucky said, and trailed off, pressing his forehead against Sam’s shoulder because it felt good and he wanted to hide. _Man the fuck up,_ he thought. _If you’re gonna be shameless and make him hold you like a baby, you fuckin’ tell him what’s your problem_. “I kind of threw a wrench in the whole thing too.”

“What’d you do?” Sam asked, but he didn’t sound angry like Steve would, didn’t sound like he was going to yell at Bucky for fucking things up. 

He shouldn’t think that, Steve might’ve groused at him but he always helped clean up whatever mess Bucky had made. In his head he always made Steve meaner than he really was. 

“In the explosion we both kind of,” Bucky fidgeted. “Got thrown across the room. I managed to pull Tony out of the way of most of it. But he wound up stuck in one of the big robot things, kinda snagged upside-down. And he was okay, but his belt was caught. So I went to get him out and— and he was hanging there upside-down—“ Bucky had to stop. 

“And then what?” Sam prompted gently after a long pause. 

Bucky swallowed hard. “I remembered,” he said. “I remembered— another Stark hanging upside down. In a car.” He rubbed his forehead. “Who I killed. In a car.” 

“Oh fuck,” Sam said. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Exactly. And I’m so fucking great at this, I fucking _told Tony about it_. I fucking told him, in great detail, how Howard recognized me, and I snapped their necks to finish the job quick and clean before anybody showed up. And I fucking _told him this_ , Sam, and he figured out about halfway through where I was going with it, and he’s begging me to just stop talking, and I can’t, I can’t stop— because I’m a fucking _asshole_ , Sam, I’m a goddamned fucking asshole.”

Jesus, he was crying. He shoved it back down ruthlessly, jamming his fingers into his eyes. 

“I don’t think that’s exactly a fair assessment,” Sam said, and he had both arms around Bucky now, a hand on the back of his head, holding him against his chest. “Bucky. It’s okay. I’ll talk to him.”

“No, he’s—“ Bucky struggled to make his mouth obedient. _Get a fucking grip, Barnes_. He sucked his breath in, held it a moment. “No, Tony was actually really nice about it. He’s cool, he’s fine. I just— why the fuck didn’t I stop talking, Sam, that was so fucking _cruel_.”

“Listen,” Sam said, rubbing a hand down the back of Bucky’s shoulder, and it was his right shoulder which meant it felt okay and not fucked-up when he did that. “Listen. Bucky. You’re doing an amazing job at acting like a reasonable normal person. But you’ve got so much on your plate, some things that you think should be easy are just going to be more than you can manage right now. You’re going to fuck up and do things that are obviously not the right thing, but you just _can’t_ do the right thing yet. You just don’t have enough of yourself left to do it, not yet, you don’t have it back yet. And that’s okay, Bucky. Anybody worth caring about is going to get that. Anybody who’s a serious jerk to you about it isn’t worth caring about. Okay? You’ll get it back. You just don’t have it yet. And that’s okay. That’s _okay_ , for now.”

“Tony was a _kid_ ,” Bucky said, “he was a kid, and I snapped his parents’ fuckin’ _necks_.”

“And you never woulda done that if you had any control over any of your life, or even any understanding of what was even goin’ on,” Sam said, “and he knows that, so leave it to him to decide whether to forgive you for it or not, and stop takin’ that away from him. You get me? It’s on him. You don’t get to decide for him that you’re not okay with it. You’re only gonna hurt him more draggin’ that shit around and dumpin’ it on him every time you see him. Let it go, baby. Let it go. You apologized, there’s nothin’ you coulda done. Now it’s his problem, so don’t add to it.”

Bucky let himself just breathe for a little bit, in and out, and Sam smelled like the same deodorant Steve wore nowadays, Steve was such a fuckin’ nerd he probably just bought whatever Sam did. He’d always done that with Bucky, just used whatever kind of hygeine or cosmetic product Bucky did, figuring Bucky cared more. Some of it was that he hadn’t had a dad to learn shaving soap preferences from— Bucky’d had to teach him how to shave— but a lot of it was just that Steve was particular about things he was particular about, and the rest he half-assed just like anybody.

Not that Bucky could talk. He’d caught on pretty quick about deodorant and currently was wearing the exact same kind himself, because it was in the bathroom and the stuff he’d had on the road had run out. 

Three fellas in one apartment who all smelled the same. Had to be some kind of joke in there somewhere. Sam didn’t smell like Steve under the deodorant at all, though. Steve’s scent was so distinctive Bucky could sometimes actually tell if he had been in a room recently or not. He’d sort of always known Steve’s scent. Sam’s was new, and pleasant.

“I don’t think I’m doing all that amazing a job at acting like _aahh_ — a reasonable normal person,” Bucky confessed eventually, his voice wavering on a spike of stupid neural feedback. He set his teeth as it spiked again and went down. 

“Believe me,” Sam said, “you’re doin’ pretty good.”

“You can’t tell me you’ve seen worse,” Bucky said. 

“I have, actually,” Sam said. “I mean, you have the advantage of a pretty fucking impressive accelerated healing ability, meaning your physical brain damage is correcting itself in a way that a regular person’s just plain can’t. But the other shit— as if that weren’t enough on its own, you know? because it would be, for most people— the other shit on top of that is this enormous, just, shitpile, you know, that you gotta dig through and find the necessary parts and get to the other side to reassemble ‘em into something you can hose off and use, and you’ve basically just strapped on your hip-waders and fuckin’ gone for it with no hesitation. It’s good, baby, you’re doin’ good.” 

“Hell of an image,” Bucky said, working his way through it. 

“I know,” Sam said, “I’m kind of a poet, really.”

This time it was a lot closer to a laugh, the noise Bucky made. “You are,” he said. “God, does that get you laid? That probably gets you _so_ laid.”

“That’s confidential, son,” Sam said, amused. Son? Sam was probably no more than two or three years older than Steve, chronologically speaking. There was no way of knowing Bucky’s chronological age, but in his head he’d always be eight months older than Steve.

“That’s a yes,” Bucky said. Hell, he’d suck Sam’s dick in a heartbeat if he thought the guy would let him. The guy was beautiful, inside and out, and managed to be both sharp and kind in a way Bucky had never imagined a person could be. And he smelled really fucking good, and he was warm and his shirt was soft and Bucky wanted to sleep on him or maybe sleep with him or maybe both.

“I’m not sayin’ a word,” Sam said. “Except. Well. Yeah. I do okay.”

“Then there’s justice in the world,” Bucky said. He was, wonder of wonders, actually getting sleepy again. Man, if he could just curl up and sleep on Sam— well, that would be pretty pathetic of him, all told, and he had no right to do it, but Christ, it was really fucking tempting. Sam’s hand was still tracing hypnotic paths up and down Bucky’s right shoulder, and Bucky closed his eyes and didn’t see anything but the blackness of the insides of his lids. He wasn’t asleep, but he was half-drifting, and it felt really, really good. 

“Nngh,” he said, “don’ lemme sleep ’n you, can’t be comf’t’ble.”

“I’m fine here,” Sam said. “Don’t you even worry. I know how to look out for myself. If I wasn’t okay with this I wouldn’t be sittin’ here.”

“Y’ crazier’n I am,” Bucky mumbled, but he was so tired, and there was really nothing behind his eyelids that didn’t belong there. 

“No,” Sam said, “just very, very patient, because I’ve found out it’s almost always worth my while in the end.”

Bucky started to follow that to a conclusion— and the conclusion was going to involve Steve Rogers somehow— but he lost the thread of it halfway through. 

 

It was always his jaw that unlocked first, and he came back from a moment of blacking out and he was in the chair and they had strapped him down and they were cutting his fingers off, cutting into his arm, vivisecting the elbow joint, all at once, and he cried out and thrashed against the fading paralysis drug and he knew it was futile to struggle so he went limp against the restraints and set his jaw and sobbed, turning his head away so at least he wouldn’t have to fucking _see_ it. 

“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” Sam said, and Bucky shivered with the pain, tried half-successfully not to scream, and Sam petted his hair and said, “it’s okay.”

Bucky opened his eyes, realizing belatedly that those weren’t restraints, they were Sam’s arms, he was— fuck, he was on a floor, the couch, the living room— 

“Oh,” he said, blinking, shuddering. “Oh. What the— fuck, did I really— _aahh—_ “ 

“You’re fine, baby,” Sam said. 

It still hurt like a white-hot knife sliding between the bones of the phantom elbow joint, and he buried his face in Sam’s shoulder and wasn’t awake enough yet to successfully stifle the cry. 

“You’re hurtin’, aren’t you,” Sam said. 

“So bad,” Bucky whimpered. “ _Christ_ it hurts so bad.” 

“Yeah you just woke up screamin’ out of a sound sleep, I know for a fact you weren’t dreamin’ about _shit_ ,” Sam said tautly. “You weren’t anywhere near the stage of sleep where you dream or have flashbacks or whatever.”

“Wasn’t dreaming,” Bucky said. “I’m oh— oka— ay. It’s okay.” _Jesus. Whine like a dog, why don’t you._ But oh _fuck_ it hurt. He was shaking with it, scattered and flustered and completely not under his own control. “Aaa- _haah_. It’s— I’m okay.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “you’re okay all right.”

“It’ll pass,” he said. Jesus. Jesus. “Fuck,” he said, kicking his feet a little as he tried not to writhe around like a dying insect. “ _Fuck_.” It let up and he gasped and subsided, completely helpless to stop a little whimper of exhausted relief. 

“Is this all from that neural receiver thing?” Sam asked. 

“Uh-hunh,” Bucky managed, panting and trembling, too wrung-out to lie. 

“So this is the arm you don’t have anymore that hurts,” Sam clarified. 

He nodded, collecting himself, and finally sat up and rubbed his face with a very unsteady hand. “It passes,” he said, and shivered miserably, looking around, teeth chattering. “Fuck. Usually I can— took me off-guard— when I’m awake I can kinda—  _Nnnnngh.”_   Another sick little jolt ran through him and he gave up on that sentence, teeth chattering before he managed to lock his jaw back down. Telling Sam he was usually better about not screaming when it hurt like that wasn’t really going to make either of them feel any better about any of this. And this was the first time he’d really dealt with it with no painkillers in his system, since it had been removed. He had to ride it out a moment before he could speak.

“What time—“ he got out. He saw the clock on the entertainment center, and turned back to Sam in surprise. “You sat like that for t-t-wo hours? What are you, nuts?”

“That’s the deepest I’ve ever seen you sleep,” Sam said. “I wasn’t gonna fuck with that. Anyway I’m comfortable, don’t tell me what to do.” He looked up. “Steve, stop creepin’ and be useful. Can you grab my phone? It’s on the nightstand in my room.”

Bucky blinked dazedly at the hallway, and sure enough, Steve was standing at the end of it. “You knew I was there?” Steve said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I was waitin’ for you to say somethin’,” Sam said. “Creeper.”

“I thought you were asleep,” Steve said. He disappeared down the hall, and came back in a second, coming over and sitting on the armchair across from Bucky’s spot of floor. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Bucky said shortly, feeling even more pathetic than he had. Okay, Steve moved quietly, but still. He’d had no idea the guy was there. 

Sam was frowning and keying something into his phone. “How long have you guys been out here?” Steve asked. 

Sam shrugged absently. “Li’l bit,” he said. “I heard Buck putterin’ around and woke up, and then I didn’t hear him go back to bed so I came out to see what was up, and figured I’d sit with him a while. We had a nice conversation, right?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. His arm felt like someone had been grinding it with sandpaper, just a dull hot red throb, and he shivered. “Jesus. Go back to bed, you guys. I’m fine.”

“Nn-nn,” Sam said, a negation, and shook his head. “I’m awake now.” He looked up from his phone for a moment. “Anyway I’m on vacation. One of vacation’s chief pleasures is afternoon naps, and there’s no better way to make sure you get a real solid afternoon nap than to make yourself get up super super early.”

A light flickered in midair and Bucky startled violently, shoving back into the couch; he was keyed-up from the pain and at his most dangerous and that realization hit him like a punch to the gut. “Oh,” Steve said. “What, JARVIS?”

Tony Stark’s face appeared in midair, and it took Bucky a second, distracted by terror of his own potential to hurt someone while he was like this, to catch on that it was an interface projected down from the device in the light fixture. “There you are.” He looked around, though the angle was weird, and Bucky realized on his end Tony was looking at a screen. “Oh wow. Okay. There you all are. Hey, Sam, I just got your text. Yes, I was actually working on that right this moment, I kind of had a setback this afternoon when my lab blew up, but it’s cool, I have more labs.” 

“What,” Steve said, trying to catch up. Tony looked a little wild-eyed, hair askew, and unshaven. 

“Dude he woke up _screaming_ out of a sound sleep because it hurt so bad,” Sam said to Tony, stern and unamused. “He’s, fuckin’, _shaking_ because it hurts so bad. It’s not okay, Tony.”

“Hey,” Bucky said, finally coming back to himself enough to catch on. “Hey, no, I’m, it’s fine, it passes.” 

“No,” Tony said, “from what I’ve come to understand, it really doesn’t, so you can stop being tough about it.” He looked tired and sad. “It turns out the whole thing is really complicated and I can’t just… shut it off without removing it. It’d be a whole lot better to just hook something back up to it and not risk brain damage by removing it. So it really means we’ve got to get a new prosthetic on there like, pronto, post-haste, without further ado.”

“Okay then,” Sam said. 

“Well,” Tony said, “that means I need input on the designs. Comrade Popsicle refuses to believe that it’s okay for him to get something functional on there, and I’m not about to just make something up and hook it into a man’s brain if he’s had no say on the design choices.”

“And the skeletal infrastructure,” Bucky said quietly. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that.

“Yes, exactly,” Tony said. “For most of the designs, there’ll have to be repairs done at least, and preferably upgrades, and that’s major surgery and really, really, really not okay to do to a guy who doesn’t seem to be in a headspace to consent to it.” 

Bucky pulled his legs up and curled himself small back against the couch. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s— it sounds good.” But he knew his tone was wrong. He was terrified of the thought that they wanted to cut out more of his bone and replace it with metal. He remembered those surgeries from before as being excruciatingly painful, and viscerally horrifying, and even if they thought they could render him unconscious so he didn’t know, he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

“Listen,” Tony said, “you know this thing in my chest? The original electromagnet went in while I was unconscious, I had no say in it, and it sucked. I redesigned it four or five times and have it the way I like it now, but it was pretty shitty to get modified like that without any say. I’m guessing you haven’t had any input into that arm up to now either. So I’m pretty set on this, Barnes— I’m not doing anything to you that you don’t want. I can get a temporary thing on there within a couple hours, but it’s not going to be very good and it’s not going to last at all. You’re going to have to get it together and make some real decisions before I do anything permanent.”

“Then,” Bucky said, and swallowed, making himself use a real normal-person confident voice, not a scared kid voice. “Then we’re going to have to have the conversation about what’s gonna happen to me. So far everyone seems to think I’m too fragile to discuss it but I’m not stupid. I’m here in the midst of a media frenzy about me being a crazed killer. I know I’m not just saying here as a guest, I’m actually in custody here. Who has jurisdiction and who decides what I eventually do? That’s the kind of stuff I need to know before we design a totally badass killing machine arm for me to wear for the next seventy years in a maximum-security mental hospital.”

Steve flinched, Sam frowned tightly, and Tony raised his eyebrows, cocked his head, and nodded. “Fair question,” he said. “Who’s in charge, Steve? I think you know the most about it.”

“We’ve been in talks since before you actually got here,” Steve admitted, eyes downcast.

“Can I attend one of these talks?” Bucky asked. “It’s been like, a week since I killed anyone. That I know of.”

Steve gave him an annoyed, hurt look, and Bucky silently caught his breath at a sharp memory of Steve’s face looking like that, in another place and time, that expression, a summer day in a hot room with an open window. Bucky looked away. “Yes,” Steve said, quietly, firmly, “you can attend one of these talks. It was scheduled for next week but we can move it up to this week. Probably the day after tomorrow. I’ll make arrangements.”

“Okay,” Bucky said. He looked at Tony. “Then can we put a temporary one on tomorrow morning?”

“Gimme two hours,” Tony said, “then come down. Uh, I’m in the second sub-basement, lab 4A, JARVIS can give you directions.” He grimaced. “I’m not looking forward to the blood parts of this, can I just say?”

“Blood,” Steve said, alarmed. 

“The transmitters are inside,” Bucky said. “Don’t worry about it, Stark. Gimme the goddamn knife, I’ll dig ‘em out myself.”

“I’ve told you that you’re really unnerving before, haven’t I,” Tony said. 

“Probably,” Bucky said, unperturbed. He collected himself and pushed to his feet. “Two hours. I’ll be there.”


	6. Magnetic Poetry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky's new arm, while crude, is good for entertainment purposes, at least.
> 
> Reporters, Steve needs comforting, Natasha is clever, Bucky behaves himself. Cameos by some of the women of Marvel, about whom I don't know enough to make fleshed-out characters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wouldn't do a bonus mid-week update only to stiff y'all of my weekend update! Would I? Well, probably, but I'm not this time.

Steve hesitated for a second, then reached out tentatively to touch Tony’s arm. Tony turned, blinking tiredly at him. The man looked awful, and had a bruise on his cheekbone, and clearly hadn’t slept. 

“Hey,” Steve said. He bit his lip. “Thanks.”

Tony looked blank for a second, and Steve braced himself not to respond to whatever it was— other people didn’t find Tony nearly as offensive as he did, and he was working on it but he just didn’t get the guy’s sense of humor— and then Tony’s expression softened and he shook his head. “I figure it’s the least I can do,” he said. “He refuses to even think of blaming my father for essentially torturing him, since Howard didn’t know— how can I possibly be angry with him when he didn’t know what he was doing when he killed Howard?” Tony shrugged. “At least, if I can help fix the mess my father helped make with his arm, I can maybe set that balance more to even.”

Steve nodded slowly. “Still,” he said, “thank you.”

“He’s a good kid,” Tony said, looking over to where Buck was curled up on the workbench with Sam sitting with him, petting his hair. He seemed to find Sam the most soothing, so Steve was letting that be. Although maybe it was just that Sam knew what to offer.

 Tony glanced back over at Steve. “And yes, I know it’s ludicrous to call him a kid when he’s 95 years old, but I can’t help it. You both just seem really young to me. I don’t mean to be obnoxious about it, I just keep forgetting.”

Steve sighed. “I take offense when it’s not warranted all the time,” he said. “You know I’m— working on it.”

“I do,” Tony said. He looked away. “You’re a good kid too, you know. And I haven’t really been fair to you either.”

“I don’t think either of us was fair about it, and it got us off to a bad start,” Steve said. “I was ten days out of the ice and furious with everything, and you had your own stack of shit to deal with, and it is what it is. I shoulda known Bucky would like you, though.”

“Wicked sense of humor on that guy,” Tony said. Steve nodded, grinning. “What they did to him was such a damn waste, that’s what gets me. Guy with a wit like that and you only want him as a clean slate.” He shook his head. 

“Yeah,” Steve said, somber again. He collected himself a little, watching as Bucky pushed himself to a sitting position. The new prosthetic was cradled across his chest in a sling, letting his body adjust slowly to the weight and especially to the neural hookups. 

“I’ll figure out what’s going on with those nerve implants,” Tony said. “There’s something screwy about them. When I do, it’ll be the foundation for a whole new field of medicine, and as a bonus, Barnes’ll have a really, really good prosthetic. I mean _really_ good.”

Steve nodded. “I know you’ll do it,” he said. Tony had spent a good while during the attachment of the limb complaining about how there was a whole big segment of the implants in Bucky’s skull that had absolutely no discernable function and was probably just left over from a failed earlier attempt, and how sloppy that was. 

“You’re probably okay to go,” Tony said to Bucky, stepping forward. “If it feels okay.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, a little groggily; he’d been in considerable discomfort through most of the procedure, but hadn’t screamed or struggled at least. Steve had held him more for comfort than restraint. “I’d kind of like to go sit on something softer than this.” He managed a shadow of a grin. 

“Can you feel anything besides fucked-up?” Tony asked. He’d already taken all kinds of readings, and had pointed out the electrical activity that indicated the neural hookups were functioning correctly, but Bucky had been so overstimulated that he’d confessed they all were just coming through as pain. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and the claw-fingers of the prosthetic twitched, closed, then opened. “Yeah, it’s— I don’t have the right number of fingers and it’s weird, but it doesn’t really hurt. Not like it did.”

“Progress,” Tony said. “I’ll take it. I’ll need readings and regular reports, but I’ll try not to interrupt your daily schedule too much.”

Bucky made an almost-laugh noise. “My busy schedule of eatin’, sleepin’, and rockin’ myself in the corner,” he said. “Or maybe reading Internet comments calling me a traitor and a psychopath?”

“I could make a virus,” Tony said thoughtfully, “that traced commenters’ IP addresses and melted their computers.”

“You got better things to do,” Bucky said. “Once Natasha’s lung grows back I’ll set her loose on them.”

“Barton’s closer to healed,” Tony said. “And don’t let him fool you, he’s perfectly competent at computers.”

“I got no doubts as to Barton’s abilities in general,” Bucky said, and let Sam steady him as he got off the workbench. “But I’ll stick to lettin’ the PR dames handle it.” He paused, then looked over at Steve. “I can say that, right? Would they be mad if I called them that?”

“I think at this point it’s such an old-fashioned word that if it ever had any sting, it doesn’t any more,” Tony offered. 

“I’ll ask them what they want me to call ‘em,” Bucky said. “And I’ll goddamn listen to ‘em and not do anything ill-advised to people on the Internet.”

“Wise man,” Sam said. 

 

They sat on the couch and watched cartoons as the sun climbed the sky. Steve had been hanging back a little bit, but Sam kept giving him considering looks, and finally he sat down right next to Bucky. “You really feel okay?” he asked quietly. 

Bucky nodded, and slid over to press his shoulder against Steve’s. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m okay.”

Steve wrapped his arms around Bucky and when that didn’t meet any resistance, pulled him in close against his chest and settled down like that. “I’m not gonna let anybody hurt you,” he said. 

Bucky laughed, muffled against Steve’s shoulder, but he sat like that unresisting for a little while, and finally said, “Good.”

 

* * *

 

Of course there were fucking reporters on the steps of the goddamn building, and they descended in a flock as Steve opened the car door and got out. He wasn’t even in uniform, he was just wearing a civilian suit in a sober navy blue (it had cost more than he had earned in 1938; Steve was mostly over inflation but it sometimes still shocked him), but they were expecting him. He’d practiced his neutral facial expressions, so he pasted one on and stood up, closing the door gracefully behind himself.

They were all shouting at once; he caught all of it, of course, but some of the words stuck out, jagged— _Bucky, Soldier, custody, traitor._ His mouth went tight and he gave them all a jaw-set, resentful look. 

“Is it true you’re refusing to surrender him to authorities,” a woman who was mashed up against a security guard said breathlessly, holding out a tape recorder. 

Steve made eye contact with her, gave her an unimpressed up-and-down look, and kept walking. “I have no comment at this time,” he said, and walked up the steps into the building. 

More-authorized media was in here, but they knew they would be in on the meeting, so they didn’t shove tape recorders into his face, and didn’t crowd around. A newspaper reporter Steve had spoken to extensively a couple of years back fell into step beside him, and said, “Is it true, Cap? Is it really him?”

Steve glanced over at him. Fuck it, he’d talk to this guy; he’d written a couple of really good pieces from the interviews with Steve. “Yeah, Jeff,” he said, “it really is. There wasn’t really any doubt by this point, was there?”

“People were wondering how you could be so sure,” Jeff said. 

Steve shook his head. “He was family, Jeff,” he said. “I’d know him anywhere. But yeah, I got about a hundred pages of files backing that up, including a definitive match on fingerprints, a confirmation of blood type, and a pretty uninterrupted paper trail establishing his whereabouts for most of the intervening time. There’s no doubt, Jeff, and there hasn’t been for some time.”

He knew there were probably fifteen tape recorders within range right now, and he could see at least one camera trained on him. “Yeah,” Jeff said, “but what about him? I mean, does _he_ know who he is?”

Steve paused, since they were at the doorway. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s him, in those videos. That’s not scripted.”

Jeff  grinned, an apparently-sincere expression. “You must be pretty happy,” he said. “To have him back.”

Steve gave him a taut half-smile. “I get him back at the cost of knowing he was tortured for 70 years,” he said. “I’d call that pretty mixed, actually.”

 

Steve leaned against the elevator wall on his way up, rubbing his face. He opened his apartment door and stopped in the entryway. Bucky was sitting in the living room watching the television; it was showing Steve’s tight smile, had subtitles as he said muffledly to Jeff, “he was tortured for seventy years.” It cut to the city council member who had been most vociferous in his objections; he was standing on the steps and declaiming, “The man is a traitor, and a disgrace to the flag. It’s unconscionable that he is still free.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, “turn that off.”

“I have a right to know,” Bucky said dully, and Steve yanked his shoes off and padded across the floor to flop down on the couch next to him. 

Onscreen, Steve was saying, “He’s the longest-serving prisoner of war in history, and we want to nail him to the wall for surviving it?”

“That’s my favorite part,” Bucky said, still without any animation, and Steve noticed he had the remote in his hand. It wasn’t live; he was re-watching it. 

The commentators were going on about something, and then they had a clip from that one video Bucky had put up, where he laughed bitterly and said, “But these people are like, you should’ve fought back, and I just wonder, like, what do you think I did? You really think they’d bother coming up with all those control mechanisms for somebody who _never fought back_?”

There was a quick flash of the end of the one video, Bucky screaming soundlessly, eyes wide. And then they went to the still Steve recognized now as Lakeisha’s handiwork, himself on the roof with Bucky in his arms. 

“So this is what you been doin’ all day,” Bucky said. “Last couple days.”

Steve breathed in, breathed out. “Yup,” he said. 

“All that trouble,” Bucky said. “On my account.”

Steve reached over and pulled him into an embrace. “Bucky,” he said. “Bucky, I’d— anything, you know that. Anything, for you.”

Bucky tipped his head down and rested his forehead against Steve’s shoulder. “I don’t think you want to promise that,” he said. 

“You know damn well I do,” Steve said. He wanted to kiss Bucky, wanted to push him down onto the couch and take his mouth; it was a sudden urge, and overpowering, but he resisted. 

“You got no sense,” Bucky said. He sat back, and looked up into Steve’s face. “Well,” he went on. “You look pretty in that outfit,” he interrupted himself, and gave a low whistle. “Rogers, you clean up all right.”

“We should probably get you a suit,” Steve said. Bucky was still looking him up and down, and while some of it was undoubtedly that Bucky had always been interested in fashion, some of it was surely that he was admiring the body under the clothes. Well, would have been, with the Bucky he’d known.

“Dunno,” Bucky said, “jeans and hoodies seem to be doin’ me pretty well. Hey, have you ever heard of a leather daddy?”

“No,” Steve said, frowning. “Is it a thing you wear?”

“Nope,” Bucky said. “Do yourself a favor and don’t Google it when anyone else is in the room.” He pushed to his feet. “C’mon, let me get a proper look at you, do a little turn. How does the jacket fit across the back?”

Steve suppressed a comment about checking how the trousers fit in back, figuring Bucky might not think it was funny to be called out for ogling. Old Bucky, pre-War Bucky would have. But he didn’t know if it was funny now. He obediently did a little turn, and didn’t manage to catch Bucky looking.

Maybe Bucky didn’t do that anymore. He— with Natasha, but then, well, the way he and Steve had been, that had always kind of been its own thing. Though Bucky had flirted a little bit more with Sam, like his old self, so it wasn’t that he didn’t do that sort of thing at all anymore. 

Just, not with Steve. Which was okay, Steve wasn’t— it wasn’t like they were going to go back to the way they’d been, too much had changed. It was just. It was different. Like a lot of things. And Steve didn’t know what was okay and what wasn’t.

“I dunno that I like current fashions,” Bucky said. He reached out and touched— ah, the seam of the pocket. “I mean. Everything’s more fitted, but less tailored. You know?”

“Adjusted for inflation,” Steve said, “clothing’s cheap. Nobody gets anything tailored anymore.”

Bucky eyed the jacket, sizing up the shoulders. “You’re not telling me you didn’t get that tailored.”

“Well,” Steve admitted. “Yeah, course I did. Suits are different. Everyone has those done. But I went to get my jeans altered and everybody thought I was crazy.”

“I figured Natasha bought ‘em for you,” Bucky said, and he was smiling and looked less hollow than he had, so that was progress. 

Steve laughed, and looked down. “She does, mostly,” he said. “Well. She tells me what to buy. I gave up on going against her advice, it was just easier. She’s the only one who doesn’t think I’m crazy with the alterations.”

Bucky was still looking him up and down. He pushed to his feet, and rolled the fabric of Steve’s lapel between his thumb and forefinger. “You look pretty good for a hundred,” he said, giving Steve a cheeky grin, but it was definitely the kind that had a weird tension behind it, like he was upset about something. It took Steve’s breath away, like half a dozen other expressions had in the last day or two— how, despite everything, Bucky was so much the same. 

“Ninety-six,” Steve said, and caught Bucky by the arm. “Hey. You okay?”

Bucky looked at him, considering, then turned back toward the TV. He still had the remote in his hand. He reversed the playback, which had been paused on the still from the roof, until he got to the city councilman standing on the steps condemning him. 

“This guy is in the folder I sent you,” he said. “He’s HYDRA.”

“Really,” Steve breathed. He hadn’t made that connection. 

“He went by the codename Iago,” Bucky said. He made a face, mouth pulled tight in resignation. His eyes were fixed on the screen, not turning toward Steve at all. “I got no proof. But it fuckin’ burns to hear him talk like that, don’t it? Traitor? Disgrace to the flag? ‘Cuz we were both in that basement, and one of us was goin’ on and on blah de blah about the new world order, and the other of us was tied to a fuckin’ chair and gagged with a rubber mouthguard, and I’ll give you _one_ guess which was me.” He tossed the remote onto the couch and stalked away toward his bedroom. 

 

Steve went and got changed, thinking furiously. There had to be a way to prove the councilman’s involvement. They’d gotten an awful lot of people, including most of those who’d suborned the police during the standoff— but those people had showed their hands in the last-ditch effort to get Bucky. Most of them, Steve suspected, had been deliberately sacrificed by their superiors, because there was a very sharp dividing line above which nobody knew the names of any superiors. And that wasn’t a coincidence. 

Councilman Dupres must figure himself to be pretty safe, but with the entry point of Bucky definitely recognizing him, they had a shot. Especially if Bucky could remember dates or circumstances or locations. Steve gave Bucky a little while to mull it over, pulling on a pair of jeans and swapping the thin dress socks for squishy workout socks. He dug out a novelty t-shirt Tony had given him to be obnoxious, deciding to wear it because Bucky would probably find it funny. (It read “I Survived The Chitauri Invasion And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt”, with a cartoony line drawing of one of the aliens; he’d been hideously offended at the time, but Barton wore his so much that Steve was sort of over it. At least over it enough to wear it for a cheap laugh from a brainwashed assassin.) He looked for his blue hoodie until he remembered Bucky had co-opted it, so he dug out a gray one instead. 

Okay, he’d killed enough time. He went along to Bucky’s room, where the door was ajar, and knocked. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. Steve pushed the door open. Bucky was sitting cross-legged with his back against the headboard of the neatly-made bed, prosthetic arm in his lap, staring contemplatively at the claw fingers as he flexed them. He didn’t look up at Steve. 

He was, however, wearing the blue hoodie. Even though the black one Natasha had bought him was hung neatly over the back of the chair by the dresser, clean and presentable. 

“If you can remember the circumstances when you met Dupres,” Steve said, “we can try to find the paperwork that’ll get him.”

Bucky shrugged his good shoulder, more of a head tilt than a proper shrug but closer than he’d been lately. He was certainly healing. “I’ll try,” he said. “But I, dates aren’t so good for me.”

Steve sat down in the chair. “It seems,” he said, trying to think how to say it, “like, um. It seems like you remember most things?” Bucky was still looking at his claw-fingers, so Steve gathered himself and went on. “When we were looking for you,” he said, looking down at his own hands, “Sam and I, we had some information about what had been done to you. And the experts we consulted, they all seemed to think there was no way you’d have any memories beyond a certain point. Like, you might recall incidents from early adulthood, and childhood, and you might have disjointed recollections from recent events, but most of your memory would be blank.” 

Steve fidgeted with the plastic aiglet on the end of the hood drawstring of his sweatshirt, tying a knot in the string and then unpicking it with his fingernails. “And they were pretty sure that you’d have damage to the parts of your brain that formed new memories. They were probably giving me a worst-case scenario, but they seemed pretty sure that you’d no longer be able to transfer things from short-term to long-term memory.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “not all of it has always worked. But I remember… stuff now. Mostly.”

“You seem fine,” Steve said, “and it’s— don’t get me wrong, I’m happy about that, I just don’t understand how you _could_ be. The things they showed me— they were so sure, Bucky, and they had all these credentials and all this experience with brain injuries.”

“So you thought,” Bucky said, “that whole time, when you were following me around, you thought you were chasing a crazy half-vegetable with your friend’s face.”

“I didn’t know,” Steve said. “I didn’t know what I’d find. I just knew, you’d pulled me out of the water, there had to be something left of you.”

“What if there hadn’t been?” Bucky asked. 

Steve looked up, met his eyes. “Then at least I’d have known,” he said. “I couldn’t do any less than everything possible.”

“I feel like maybe I’m missing something,” Bucky said, looking back down. “I don’t really get why you’d go to all that trouble, maybe get yourself killed, for a hollow shell like that.”

“You’re not missing anything,” Steve said. “The old Bucky would’ve done the same for me, and would’ve said exactly the same thing to me when I reciprocated. He never understood that I felt the same way about him as he did about me.”

Bucky let out a short, sharp laugh, as if startled. “Yeah,” he said, but didn’t elaborate, and didn’t look up. “Yeah, okay.”

“I didn’t give him a lot to go on,” Steve said. It was easier, to say it like he was someone else. “He fought my battles for me, but I never fought his. We watched each other’s backs, but most of the time his was only in trouble because he’d followed me into it when I dove in without ever considering the consequences. And in the end, I led him back into danger, let him fall, never looked for him, and left him there.”

Bucky looked up sharply at that, jaw set. “Don’t you fuckin’ say shit like that,” he said. “Don’t you fuckin’ dare.” Abruptly he laughed, his entire face changing, and shook his head. “Just because Bucky Barnes fuckin’ died don’t mean you can talk shit about Steve Rogers and he won’t still come after you,” he said.

Despite himself, Steve laughed, and it took the air out of him like a punch. “Yeah,” he said shakily, eyes stinging with sudden tears. “Yeah.”

“You big sap,” Bucky said. 

“I’m not cryin’,” Steve said.

“Get over here,” Bucky said, shoving forward off the headboard. “Of course you’re not.”

Steve sat next to him on the bed, and wrapped his arms around him. Bucky was warm and, crucially, smelled like himself— so far, he hadn’t seemed to, not strongly enough, but now it hit Steve hard, and he buried his nose under Bucky’s ear and breathed him in. “I never cry,” Steve said thickly, squeezing his stinging eyes shut. 

“Course you don’t,” Bucky said. They sat like that for a long moment, and Bucky rubbed his hand along Steve’s back. “Hey,” Bucky said quietly, after a bit, “you’re okay, Steve. It’s okay.”

Steve was doing his level best not to bawl like a child but it was all crashing down on him again, all of it— everything since the ice, all the nightmares, the isolation, the confusion, all of it. He managed to keep quiet, but he shook and streamed tears anyway. “Jesus,” he said shakily, trying in vain to keep his breath under control, “I got no call to be cryin’ on _you_ —“

“Bullshit you don’t, Rogers,” Bucky said, dragging him down and enfolding him in both arms, the real one and the fabric-wrapped metal one. Steve made one more token effort at resisting, and then wrapped his arms around Bucky’s waist and buried his head in his shoulder and let go. 

“I got you,” Bucky said thickly, curling around him. After a couple minutes Steve got himself marginally under control, but he didn’t pull his face away. Bucky’s real hand was moving steadily, reassuringly, _familiarly_ between his shoulder blades, though the distance it had to traverse was greater than traditionally. 

“Sorry,” Steve muttered. 

Bucky laughed softly. “Cushla,” he said, skimming his fingers up to linger on the nape of Steve’s neck, “it’s been a real shitty little while for you, hasn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Steve admitted. Cushla. He hadn’t heard that one in a long time. Nobody said it anymore. It was probably Irish. _Acushla machree_. He’d never known what it meant, but Bucky’s mother had used it. 

“You woke up in a new century and everybody you ever knew was dead,” Bucky said. “And everybody had all these ideas of who you were supposed to be. And I bet nobody was real interested in who you actually were.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, raising his head, “compared to—“

Bucky put his finger against Steve’s lips. “I ain’t talkin’ about anybody else,” he said. “That don’t matter. It’s not like me having a real _real_ shitty time of it makes your time any less shitty. It makes it worse, Steve, because you get even more guilt than if I was dead, plus the hassle of having to deal with the mess of me _not_ bein’ dead.”

“It’s not a hassle,” Steve said, shaking his head free of Bucky’s hand on his mouth. “You’re not a hassle.”

Bucky gave him a soft, sweet smile, but his eyes were considering, sad. “Whether it’s a mess you’re glad to take on or not it’s still a mess,” he said. “Even work you love is still work. Maybe you have superpowers but you’re still a human, Steve, you’re still a person.” He ran the backs of his fingers along the side of Steve’s face, then wiped a tear from the corner of Steve’s eye with the pad of his thumb, letting his fingertips rest along the edge of Steve’s cheekbone. 

“Not without you,” Steve said. 

Bucky half-smiled, wry. “I guess I understand that,” he said. “But see, if having me as context is the only thing that keeps you from being just an idea— see, if you get hung up on the idea of me, it kind of just turns that around and puts it all on me. Y’know?”

“I do,” Steve said. “I get it. Buck, it’s okay if you’re not exactly like you used to be. I’m not like I used to be either.”

Bucky’s expression was solemn, and he seemed to be looking for something in Steve’s face. “Thing is,” he said eventually, “I think…” He hesitated, pulling his lower lip into his mouth. “I think I might be actin’ a lot more together than I really am.”

“That’s okay,” Steve said. “As long as you’re here at all, I can do this.”

“It’s not that I don’t remember things,” Bucky said. “It’s that— it’s that I do, but— I remember more than there was.”

Steve frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I remember stuff that didn’t happen,” Bucky said. “I remember you doin’ all kinds of stuff I know you didn’t do. And I can mostly tell what’s real and what’s fake, but I can’t always.”

Steve nodded slowly. “You seemed so sure about all the HYDRA stuff,” he said. 

“I was,” Bucky said. “That shit, they didn’t bother with. They figured once they wiped me I’d forget it. The fake memories, those are all about things they knew they couldn’t remove. Like, like you. They put stuff in, about you, so there was even more, and it was confusing, so I wouldn’t know— I don’t know what was real.”

“If it’s about me,” Steve said, “you can always just ask me.”

Bucky contemplated him, and ran the tips of his fingers along the edge of Steve’s jaw,  the underside of his ear, the lower edge of his chin. “I can’t always,” he said. “I know I lied to you about things. There’s stuff you didn’t know. Stuff I didn’t want you to know. But now I can’t remember what you really didn’t know, and what I thought you didn’t know, and what they tried to make me think you didn’t know, and… it’s a fuckin’ mess, Stevie.”

“I can tell you what I do know,” Steve said. 

Bucky closed his eyes, and half-smiled. “Maybe I’ll ask you to do that sometime,” he said. He shook his head. “But not now.”

“No?” Steve had the distant awareness that he’d be embarrassed to be like this with anyone else— and hell, even back when they’d been kids, he’d never have cried on Bucky like that, not just shameless and wide open like that. 

But Bucky would, and had, cried on him like that— in extraordinary circumstances, yes, but more than once. Bucky’d had nothing to prove, not compared to Steve. “Naw,” Bucky said. “Right now we got shit to do. Like that thing tomorrow. You gotta tell me who’s gonna be there and what I can expect.”

 

* * * 

 

“Keesh,” Jeremy called. “Keesh!”

“Yeah,” Lakeisha answered, sticking her head out of the bathroom door. Jesus, she’d been home like two hours in the last two days, what now? 

“Your phone,” he said.

“God,” she said. “That thing ‘bout to catch fire.” She shut the bathroom door for a moment, wrapped herself in her bathrobe, and hung up her towel. When she opened the door again Jeremy was standing there with her phone in his hand, leaning against the bannister. 

“They gave you a raise, right?” he said, smirking wryly. “That mean they own you?”

“I got the budget for a staff,” she said, “and I’m gonna get some more people on this as soon as I get a second to hire ‘em.” She took the phone, and she’d missed a call from— shit, she’d missed a call from Barnes, two or three minutes ago.

“Aw man,” she said. He hadn’t left a voicemail. She called him back, wandering back down the stairs. Jeremy followed her absently. 

Barnes answered on the third ring. “Yeah,” he said. 

“Sorry I didn’t pick up,” she said, “I was in the shower. What do you need?”

“It’s okay,” he said, “I didn’t realize you were off-duty or I wouldn’t’ve called.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. 

“It really wasn’t important,” he demurred. 

“Well, I’m on the phone now,” she said, teasing. “Spit it out, man.”

He made a little noise that could have been a laugh. “Well, since you put it that way,” he said. “Couple of things. Uh, did you see the thing where that city councilman said all that shit about me?”

She sighed. “Probably,” she said, and made herself not say _which one_? 

“Dupres,” he said, answering the question she hadn’t asked. “On the steps, there. That clip.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Hey. Don’t worry about it.”

“No, no,” he said. “It’s just, I know that guy, right?”

“You know him,” she said. 

“Yeah,” he said. “And by that I mean he’s HYDRA. And by that I mean, I might be able to name names and specifics.” 

“Oh fuckin’ _jackpot_ ,” Lakeisha said fiercely. “Jackpot. Are you serious.”

“Natasha’s tracking down whatever correlations she can find to the details I can confirm,” he said. “We might not be able to nail him to the wall but we have enough to make things really uncomfortable for him.”

“That would be so sweet,” she said. 

Barnes laughed, a little bitterly. “He wasn’t really any kind of big shot,” he said. “I wouldn’t bother goin’ after him except it just stings so damn much to hear that shit come out of his mouth when he was fuckin’ _there_. Y’know? Both of us in that room and him there of his own free will and me shackled to a goddamn chair, and he’s callin’ _me_ a traitor.”

“I feel you,” she said. “I feel you. We’ll get him.”

“I’m not,” he said, a little unsteadily, “it’s not for revenge. It’s— none of this is for revenge. I just.”

“No,” she said, “no, I know. They have to be stopped. It’s okay, Barnes.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Uh, I should let you go.”

“You said a couple of things,” she reminded him. “What else?”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, uh. First off I looked up what happened to my folks. I got family alive still. That can wait, but I just— some people were going on about not believing I really was James Barnes and I thought, well, there’s like DNA and things now, and I found, my first cousin lives in Queens, he’s still alive, I don’t know if that’s,” He trailed off. “I don’t know,” he said again. 

“Did you contact him?” Lakeisha asked. 

“No,” he said. “No. You said— I, that’s actually the other thing. I haven’t said or done anything, haven’t texted or posted anything to anybody at all and I was wondering, I know it’s a bad idea for me to respond to anything but I thought, if I don’t do anything controversial or political, if I could maybe… I might seem less weird and threatening if I can just go back to the kinds of things I was posting before?”

“Yeah,” she said. “No, you’re probably right. Um, text me the first couple of things just so I can look ‘em over. Okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. 

“And we’ll set up something so you can meet your cousin,” she said. “I, you know, if we can hold off on calling him or texting him right this minute—“

Barnes laughed dryly. “He’s 84,” he said. “I doubt he texts.”

“You’re 95 and you text,” she said, teasing. 

“I’m 97,” he said. “Get it right.” He paused a moment. “Last time I saw Johnny he was like ten. I used to babysit for him.” Another pause. “He has grandkids the age he was then. Shit, the age _I_ was then.”

“That’s fucked-up,” Lakeisha said. “Barnes, what happened to you is fucked-up. We’re gonna make it as right as we can, okay? Starting with nailing that fuckin’ worm to the wall. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. 

 

* * * 

 

[Barnes]: [@Natasha] thank you for saying it better than I’d know how to. I’m sorry you got hurt saving me.

…

[Barnes]: I looked it up, my mother died in 1958 and the last of my sisters died in 2009. so I guess I’m glad at least they thought I died a hero.

…

[Barnes]: apparently I remain the world’s leading expert on steven grant rogers. memory like swiss cheese and I still remember how he likes his eggs.

[Barnes]: also I can confirm that the super soldier serum did absolutely nothing to fix steve rogers’s snoring issues, if anything he’s louder

…

[Barnes]: believe it or not I am aware that I am a controversial figure and therefore I am making a deliberate effort to say nothing of particular substance until that’s sorted out

[Barnes]: this is as political as I will currently get: my steve rogers impression [Simpsons screenshot of newspaper with headline “old man yells at cloud”]

…

[Barnes]: little-known steve rogers factoid of today: he cannot resist making puns about my missing arm

[Barnes]: I am going to use the hashtag (I looked that up) #armjokes to catalog all the terrible things people say to me about my disability

[Barnes]: because it’s not like people aren’t constantly saying horrible shit about other things to me but the arm stuff is actually funny so let’s go with that

[Barnes]: #1: [@Rogers] “Aw Buck lemme give you a hand with that” #armjokes 

[Barnes]: #2 [@Rogers] “don’t worry Buck you’re armless” #armjokes

[Barnes]: I shot him 3 (4?) times and stabbed him and broke his face last year so he gets 73 more free passes on that but then I start retaliating with noogies

 

* * * 

 

It was hard to shave one-handed. Bucky knew he’d done it, in his missing years— in the later years they’d done most of whatever grooming was done to him, but earlier on he’d had a lot more autonomy and the arm had been a lot less functional. The memories were disjointed, but mostly comprehensible. He cut himself, cursed a lot, and Steve knocked on the bathroom door. Bucky, towel-clad and damp, glowered at him, and Steve immediately saw the issue and said, “Let me.”

And it felt weird, but good, to sit on the closed toilet and tip his head back and give his throat to Steve. It wasn’t that he wasn’t completely and constantly aware of how easy it would be for Steve to kill him; no, he knew that perfectly well, could even envision it clearly in his mind’s eye. He just knew with absolute certainty that he didn’t care. If Steve wanted him dead, he didn’t really want to be alive. And that was the fundamental basis of this relationship. It was warped as fuck, he was well aware, but it was what he had, and as long as Steve didn’t realize that’s what his trust was based on, they were fine. 

It was intimate and oddly sensual, and familiar, Steve so close to him, bending over him, and he remembered this from Brooklyn, remembered a much smaller Steve doing it, cutting his hair, shaving him. Remembered— kissing, smooth faces freshly-shaven— that had to be real, it fuckin’ _had_ to be, and he was on the verge of saying something, struggling to make it into words without just blurting _hey Steve did we used to fuck?_ when Natasha popped her head in the bathroom door and gave a low whistle. 

“That’s hot,” she said frankly. 

Steve laughed, fortunately pulling the razor away before he did so. “Natasha,” he said. 

“No, no,” she said, leaning against the door frame, waving a hand. “Keep going. Then maybe make out. That’d be cool.”

“Five bucks and I’ll take the towel off,” Bucky said. He was trying not to be self-conscious about how weird his arm looked, with the remnants of the armor plating still on the shoulder and halfway down the bicep, merging clumsily into the anchoring ring for the crude temporary prosthetic. That and the scarring around the top of the armor plates were things he’d become self-conscious about as soon as he remembered having enough of a self to do so.

“Damn,” Steve said, “it’s gonna cost you more than that to get my pants off. You know a dollar’s not what it used to be, Bucky.”

“You shaving more than just his face?” Natasha asked. “Because I forgot my wallet back at my place but I could go get it.”

“This ain’t a sideshow,” Steve said. “Go on with you.”

“You’ve seen all of it anyway,” Bucky said in Russian, just because he could remember how to, and she laughed. 

“Of each of you, yes,” she answered in the same language, “but not together, you know. I feel that would add a dimension, no?”

“I’m gonna teach myself Russian and not let on,” Steve said mildly, drawing the razor carefully along the underside of Bucky’s chin. “There. Rinse.” He stepped back, rinsed the razor off and stuck it into the cup by the sink that held three razors now, each with a differently-colored piece of electrical tape around the handle. The toothbrushes were marked the same way. It was very old-mannish, and Bucky’s color was apparently red. (Steve was blue. Sam had somehow scored silver metallic tape.)

“The day you can keep that kind of straight face,” Bucky said, “is the day that you deserve whatever secrets you uncover that way.” He’d switched back to English but his accent wasn’t back to normal, he noticed. He bent over the sink and rinsed his face, then cast a critical eye over his hair, which was hanging in damp hunks. “I should cut this off.”

“Later,” Steve said, “we can, if you want.” 

Bucky frowned at it. “Yeah,” he said, “okay.” 

“Are you ready for today?” Natasha asked, stepping around Steve as he moved out of the bathroom. She picked up a comb and started working on Bucky’s hair, deftly working out much of the water and all of the tangles before he had a chance to stop her, and finishing up by producing a hair elastic out of nowhere and pulling it back for him. 

“Thanks,” he said. “Uh—“ Steve had moved on down the hallway. He met Natasha’s eyes in the mirror. “No.”

“There’s a closed-session meeting first,” she said, “as Steve has probably told you— the other Avengers, and some related hero-types, remnants of SHIELD, anyone who still operates in this community. They’re going to come to a decision first, and then we’ll have the more open session, which is gonna have law enforcement and government people and the like. You’ll be at both, but I’m not going to make you sit through the whole thing.”

“I don’t know anything about any of the other hero-types,” Bucky said. 

Natasha settled the elastic properly in his hair, tugging the ponytail downward so it sat at the nape of his neck instead of the back of his head like a woman’s hairstyle. “Well,” she said. “Put some pants on and come meet them. I invited some of them to brunch up on the common floor.”

He turned around to look at her, biting his lip. “Yeah?”

“Shall I give you a mission?” she asked seriously, looking up into his face. 

Some of the unpleasant queasiness in his gut settled into certainty. “Yes,” he said. 

“You’re going to charm the hell out of them,” she said. “Follow my lead.” She tapped the prosthetic just below the weird robotic elbow joint. “I noticed your arm jokes hashtag, we’re going to make more jokes about it. Are you really okay with that?”

“I can be,” he said, steeling himself. 

She pulled something out of her pocket and thunked it against his metal forearm. He realized it was a magnet. “It sticks,” she said. “Excellent.”

He looked at the magnet, which was small and unadorned and round, and then looked up at her face again. “Okay,” he sighed, “let me put some pants on.”

 

* * *

 

Steve followed the sound of raucous laughter all the way from the elevator. There were a bunch of people in the common living room area, it sounded like, and they were all really amused by something. To his surprise he recognized Natasha’s voice, raised and ragged with laughter, exclaiming “oh my God that’s awesome.”

The answering voice wasn’t loud enough to be understandable, even to Steve’s ears, but he quickened his pace because it sounded like Bucky. As he came closer he heard no words, just four or five people at least laughing their asses off. Most of them sounded like women. 

It wasn’t the television they were laughing at, he could see that much. To his surprise he recognized Maria Hill sitting on the couch, both hands over her mouth; none other than Carol Danvers was sitting next to her, head thrown back in a guffaw. He’d known she was coming in for the meeting later, but he hadn’t figured on finding her up here. Jessica Drew was on the other bit of the sectional, doubled over. 

Natasha was slouched on the other couch, wearing workout clothes, hair in a messy ponytail, and she was holding her ribs as she laughed. She saw him first. “Hey, Steve,” she said. 

“What’d I miss?” Steve asked, and stopped short as he caught sight of Bucky, lying on the floor. “Buck—“

“Hey,” Bucky said, sitting up and dissolving into giggles. He wasn’t wearing his sling, and the crude prosthetic Tony had slapped on him was bedecked with— refrigerator magnets. And he had a pink Hello Kitty barrette in his hair. Clint was sitting on the floor next to him, looking elaborately innocent with something small concealed in his hands. Another barrette, Steve supposed. 

“What the hell,” Steve said. 

“I’m the prettiest princess,” Bucky managed before he dissolved entirely in giggles. 

Steve looked around helplessly. “Did you assholes _drug_ him?”

Everyone fell out laughing, and Natasha said, “Steve, my ribs, please— please,” which was probably the first time she’d ever asked for mercy in his presence. 

Maria Hill sat up first and said, “It was his idea.”

Bucky sat up, breath hitching, and he was just wrecked, exhausted with laughing. It was more than a decade even in just plain chronological time since Steve had seen him look like that, not since they were pretty much kids. “The Internet,” he tried. 

“I’m familiar with the concept,” Steve said. 

Bucky shoved himself over to lean back against the couch, real hand splayed out across his stomach. He looked so good, looked casual and easy, one long leg stretched out in front of him, the other knee drawn up. “Hoo boy,” he said. “So there’s these kids, on the Internet.” He gestured easily and one of JARVIS’s hologram displays appeared, way more facile with it than Steve had managed to get with it yet. “They have all these jokey Twitter accounts.” 

“We’re trolling them,” Natasha said. 

“Trolling,” Steve said. “I thought that was bad.” He bent to look over Bucky’s shoulder at the screen. “Uh, what?”

“This one account is pretending to be my metal arm,” Bucky said. “Like it’s sentient or something. It has a diary.”

“That’s weird,” Steve said.

“No, it’s hilarious,” Bucky answered. He opened a folder and scrolled down a list of images and paged through them. They were cartoons. People had drawn cartoons of Captain America and Bucky. There were a bunch of Bucky with refrigerator magnets stuck to his metal arm, mostly with him looking angry about it. 

“What the,” Steve said. 

“Bucky captured a lot of imaginations,” Carol said. “I admit, I was totally riveted to my television through the whole thing. It was pretty amazing.”

“Oh, the final scene with you holding Bucky in your arms and crying— that was really amazing,” Jessica volunteered, sitting up. 

“It was kind of a stroke of genius,” Hill said drily. 

“Steve’s a crybaby,” Bucky said. Then he laughed. “Seriously like half of these are gay porn of us, it’s really funny. If you wanna pose we can troll on them too.”

“Pose,” Steve said blankly. Bucky opened an image file that was a drawing recognizably of Bucky, metal arm and all, taking Steve manfully from behind, musculature gleaming in loving detail, Steve’s face lax with pleasure. “What! Oh my God, Bucky, we are not posting nude photos online!”

“I wasn’t sayin’ we hadda _reenact_ that one,” Bucky said, but the giggles came back and he clicked to the next picture, which was a muscle-bound caricature of Steve with both hands fisted in Bucky’s hair, pushing his enormous cock into Bucky’s mouth as Bucky stared up submissively.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve said, realizing in sudden horror that _all the women in the room could see the screen_. “Bucky! Stop it! Oh my God.” His ears were burning and he could tell his face was red. “That’s not, that’s not _right_.”

Bucky relented and closed the pictures. “Aw Stevie,” he said. “It’s okay. I won’t make you put pictures of your dick on the Internet.”

“I, I guess, people seem to be doing just fine at filling in the details,” Steve said, flustered. 

“Are you saying those are accurate?” Carol asked, raising an eyebrow.

Steve stared at her, completely unable to form a sentence, and everyone fell out laughing. Bucky reached up and snagged him by the hand. “Come on,” Bucky said, “sit down, stop blushing, it’s fine.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, but came and sat down, and to his embarrassed gratification Bucky put his real arm around him and embraced him. 

“I’m sorry, Steve,” he said. “I shouldn’t’a embarrassed you like that. It’s okay.”

Steve hunched a little self-consciously next to him. “It ain’t _seemly_ ,” he said. 

“It’s the twenty-first century,” Bucky said. “Nobody’s got any notion of privacy when it comes to stuff like this, but they can’t fathom sharing a bedroom with anybody they ain’t fuckin’. Welcome to the modern paradox.”

“I know, right?” Steve muttered. 

“Shared life experience,” Natasha said, like it was a joke punchline, and he frowned at her; he remembered using that line on her about having trouble finding people to date. She shrugged innocently. 

Bucky hauled Steve right in close and kissed him on the side of the head, then let him go to free up his good hand again. “It’s okay, Stevie,” he said. “I’ll manage your public image. I’m totally dignified.” He paged through something else and displayed a photograph, obviously just taken, of himself lounging regally on the couch, arm bedecked with magnets and hair in several jeweled little pink clips. He was smirking slightly and managed to look totally debauched.

Steve laughed despite himself, and leaned in to read the caption. “Have retired from being brainwashed cyborg assassin,” he read out loud. “Started new career as fridge magnet & barrette holder.” He shook his head. “Buck, you’re somethin’ else.”

“I put that up like three minutes ago,” Bucky said, “and I already have six hundred retweets. I got social media capital like you wouldn’t believe.”

Steve looked around the room at the assembled people. They’d come for that afternoon’s meeting, at which they’d be deciding Bucky’s fate. This was probably as good a warm-up as any. 

“Hang on,” he said. “I have a thing. Nobody leave. I’ll be right back.” He pushed to his feet, and didn’t break stride when he heard Clint say, “by thing does he mean cock?”

Steve strode into his apartment and found Sam in the living room, looking sleepy-eyed and eating cereal. “Hey,” Sam said. 

“Hey,” Steve answered, walking past into his bedroom and finding the small box he was looking for. He walked back out, paused, and said, “You’re not ever going to guess what Bucky’s doing right now.”

Sam blinked at him. “What?”

“Just,” Steve gestured, then shook his head. “Go check his Twitter.”

Sam blinked again, obviously freshly awoken. “What?”

“JARVIS,” Steve said. “Can you bring up Bucky’s Twitter page?”

“I assume you mean to show Sam the photograph he just uploaded,” JARVIS said, and popped up a hologram display with the photo in full-resolution glory. 

“What the,” Sam said, and rubbed his eyes. 

“Read the caption,” Steve said. “I’m going back up there with this,” and he rattled the little box.

“What is th— oh my god,” Sam said, “I will be right up.”

“Take your time,” Steve said. 

He came back in to expectant silence, and everyone staring at him. He went right up to Bucky, sat down on his left side, and peeled off the magnets, which were mostly from restaurants with their takeout numbers on them. 

“What,” Bucky said, and then Jessica caught sight of the box.

“Magnetic poetry,” she said, “you’re a genius!”

Steve did the first poem himself— “blue eye d boy haunt s brilliant red steel heart”, took a photo, posted it on his Twitter and tagged Bucky, then yielded the floor to the others. 

Most of their compositions were salacious. Sam showed up and participated enthusiastically, and Steve remembered belatedly to text Lakeisha. 

“Bucky has rediscovered Twitter,” he wrote. “He’s posting photos of magnetic poetry stuck to his temporary prosthetic.”

“Oh,” she wrote back, “I been on it, no worries. I okayed most of this. The magnetic poetry’s a great idea. That and the princess hair clips should go a good long way toward garnering him a lot of sympathy.”

Steve read the message three times, then looked slowly over at Bucky, who was sitting on the couch with Natasha, looking patient as she picked thoughtfully through the metal box for words for her poem. She caught the direction of Steve’s glance and said, “Steve, I’m buying you the erotic version of this like pronto, we could make this a lot more fun than it already is.”

“He’s not keeping that prosthetic very long,” Steve said. It hurt him to look at it, and he wished Bucky had his sleeve rolled down. It was ugly, and clumsy, with a three-pronged claw for a hand and slow, clunky action. It had zero style and less functionality; its only saving grace was that it didn’t weigh much, so Bucky didn’t have to always keep it in a sling. Steve cast an appraising eye over the room and thought it over, and as he did so, came to sit next to Natasha. “This was your idea, wasn’t it,” he said. 

“I’ve no idea what you mean,” she said, delicately placing another word onto Bucky’s not-forearm. “Oh, there _is_ sex in this kit,” she interrupted herself, and sure enough, pulled out the word “sex”. 

Nobody was close by; Clint was telling Jessica a story, and Carol was listening in while Maria bent studiously over her phone. “Having Bucky surround himself with girls and put pink sparkle clips in his hair?” Steve murmured.

“It was at least half his idea,” she said. 

“I been wanting to do the thing with the refrigerator magnets,” Bucky said. “But yeah, Steve, I know who these people are and I know what’s happening today.”

“ _She throb s velvet wet liquid sex_ ,” Natasha wrote. “You need more surface area on this arm, Djeyms.” She posed him with the arm tilted next to his face and took a picture with her phone. Bucky made a wide-eyed pretend-scandalized face. 

“The old one had plenty of surface area but it wasn’t actually magnetic over most of it,” Bucky said. “I asked Tony if we could make the new one magnetic and he said yeah.”

“Is that the only spec you gave him?” Natasha asked. 

“So far? Well, that and I’d like it not to hurt quite so much,” Bucky said. 

“The new one doesn’t hurt, does it?” Steve asked, concerned. 

“Nah,” Bucky said. “Kinda… it feels crazy, like I have about eight fingers and can’t move any of them independently. But it don’t really hurt at all, so I’m sittin’ pretty.” He looked over; he was watching Jessica, and Steve wondered if he knew who she was, knew she’d been a tool of HYDRA too. She was one he was counting on to be sympathetic. “How long we got?” Bucky asked Steve quietly, turning to look at him, all humor gone from his face. 

Steve looked at his watch. “Like an hour,” he said. “We’re sort of waiting to see if a certain somebody shows up.” He cast a meaningful glance at Maria, who didn’t look up from her phone. 

“Should I change?” Bucky asked. 

Steve cast an appraising look over him. Bucky was wearing a pair of reasonably intact jeans, a black t-shirt that had the Batman symbol on it, and still had the pink sparkly Hello Kitty clip in his hair. “I think you’re okay as-is,” Steve said, reaching over and carefully unfastening the hair clip. “I’d take this out, though.”

“Seems kinda informal,” Bucky said, “but I don’t have anything nicer.”

Steve bit his lip. “If you want you could wear one of my suits,” he said. “I do have a couple of modern civilian ones.”

Bucky shook his head. “Your jeans are one thing, you wear ‘em loose, but your dress pants won’t fit me. No way. Your waist is like a girl’s.”

“Your _ass_ is like a girl’s,” Steve shot back. 

“Mmm,” Natasha said absently, “you’d look fabulous in drag, Djeyms.”

“Why is she calling you that?” Steve asked. 

“Russian pronunciation of James,” Bucky said. “She’s being cute. Like anyone I knew in Russia would ever have called me by a Christian name.”

“When I am on painkillers,” Natasha said, “I believe myself a great wit.” She pushed herself up. “Help me up, Djeyms, I have to go put better clothes on. I can’t be seen like this.”

Bucky pulled her to her feet solicitously. “I’ll come with you,” he said, and picked the magnets off his arm, sticking them back to the box. “Thanks for this,” he said to Steve. “It was really funny. I’m sorry about springing gay porn on you in front of everybody.”

“Aw,” Steve said, “it’s okay.” 

“I know it is,” Bucky said, with a cheeky grin straight from his 20-year-old self. “I just figured I should say I was sorry anyway.” He leaned in and gave Steve a casual one-armed hug, brief but firm, and patted him on the back. It was disconcertingly like, yet unlike, his old mannerisms; his body language was unmistakably different now, his center of gravity different, his build changed. But he’d always been a handsy guy, a touchy-feely type, always manhandling Steve around. When Steve had shown up bigger, he hadn’t done it. Sergeant Barnes had done very little touching. 

Steve watched him go, bemused, then went and stuck the magnetic poetry to the enormous industrial fridge in the common kitchen. 

 

* * *

 

“You did so well,” Natasha said, letting herself cradle his cheek in her hand in the elevator. He still watched the elevator’s interface distrustfully, but he said nothing, and as the doors open he finally looked into her face and gave her, not a smile, but at least a neutral look. 

“That was hard,” he said quietly. 

“I know,” she said. “You have no training in that kind of thing— you actually have training against it. But look, even Steve mostly bought it, and he knows you better than anybody.”

“He’s not hard to fool,” Barnes said. There was no bravado in it; his body language had gone very Winter Soldier again, absent all swagger, with great economy of motion. “One-on-one, maybe, but in a group like that, he’s easily distracted, in the moment. He’ll catch on later, though. You may get away with it at the time, but he always calls you on it later.”

Natasha shook her head, smiling, as she led him down the hallway into her bedroom. He hesitated at the doorway; he had never come in here. She gestured, and he came in. It was like one of those spirits of folklore, who couldn’t enter uninvited. She filed that away to consider later. 

“You have tremendous natural aptitude,” she said. “You would be a great asset to me, if you were interested in working with me.” Something in the sentence made him flinch, but it was gone as soon as she noticed it. 

“I wouldn’t mind learnin’,” he said, with an easy Brooklyn smile that seemed sincere enough even to her, but was gone as soon as he’d finished with it. He breathed in deeply and let it out slowly. “I would like to be useful,” he said quietly, “and I am… it’s not that I am afraid that I will be called upon to continue the same type of work I was doing before. But I am… concerned. I do not wish to exchange one leash for another.”

Natasha nodded. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I was… very disturbed when I found out how far HYDRA had penetrated, because I had been so convinced it mattered when I changed sides.”

“Yeah,” Barnes said. When he wasn’t concentrating on it, his accent faded in and out, stronger on certain concepts, pronounced on some words. He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, prowling uneasily around the edge of the room as she picked out a pair of reasonable dress pants, hooked down a blouse from the hanger, laid them out on the bed, then dug around for a nude bra that wouldn’t compress her healing ribs too badly, tossed it onto the bed. 

She went to the door and jerked her head. “I’m going to do my hair real quick,” she said, “come talk to me.” 

He hesitated at the bathroom door as well, and she beckoned him in. He wound up sitting on the edge of the tub as she plugged in her straightener and combed water through her hair, washed her face. “I’m also worried,” Barnes said, “that it might be very easy for me to go back to… just… more of the same, just with slightly less torture. It’s real easy for me, even now, to just kinda check out, take orders, and switch off.”

“It would be a waste to use you like that,” Natasha said. “You’re far too intelligent. They gave you a fair degree of autonomy on your missions, didn’t they?”

“Depended,” he said. “I don’t always remember, now. Some of it, I think so.”

“Your file notes your tactical ability,” she said. “It does not note your chameleon tendencies, though. You are very good, my friend, at changing to suit a crowd, and that is not a common ability.”

He nodded slowly. “I think Bucky did that a lot,” he said, and when he referred to himself like that, he usually meant pre-Army Bucky. “Hung out with different crowds, knew how to please different people.”

She nodded, and began to methodically fix her hair. He watched, silent, motionless. “You’ll do fine, then, today,” she said.

“ _Should_ I change?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Don’t look too put-together or collected, you want to be a sympathetic figure. Too polished and they’ll doubt your victimhood.” She frowned at her reflection; she looked tired and old, more so than normally when injured. It had been a serious injury. “You know Jessica Drew was—“

“I know,” he said. “She watched me a lot. Bought it less than the others, I think.”

“She’s most likely to be sympathetic,” Natasha said, “but also—“

“Most likely to want to test me,” Barnes said, “and most likely to know how.”

Natasha nodded. No, Bucky Barnes wasn’t any kind of an idiot. God, she wanted to fuck him. Only the knowledge that her ribs would never take it made it easy for her to ignore. 

She did a minimal job on her makeup, not too much but enough to make her look a little less run-down. She didn’t really need to be constantly reminding everyone that rescuing Barnes had gotten her nearly killed.

“Funny, what’s the same and what’s different,” Barnes said, watching her in the mirror. 

“Oh?” she asked. 

“Mascara used to be a thing in a, like in a sort of solid bar,” he said. “You put it on with a brush, but you blinked it on just the same way you do now.”

“Really,” she said. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybelline.” It was the same brand she was using at the moment. 

“That’s funny,” she said. “What about eyeliner?”

“You could get kohl pencils,” Barnes said. “Same deal, I think. Hair stuff is just all different, though. Shampoo is kind of— we used soap and it wasn’t at all the same thing. Did different stuff to your hair. I wouldn’t know how to do the hairstyles I used to, the way shampoo makes my hair go now. It gets all fluffy, it never used to do that.” 

“We have to strip everything out and then put it back in,” Natasha said with a laugh. “What about lipstick?”

“About the same,” Barnes said. He flicked a glance at her mouth, not yet painted, then up to her eyes, and there was some heat in it. “Tastes different.”

She had to lick her lower lip and grin at that, sucking the lip into her mouth, letting it slide out, watching him watch her in the mirror. “Bet it does,” she said softly. “You watch a lot of girls do their makeup?”

“Yeah,” he said, mouth pulling to one side in amusement. “If you fuck it all off ‘em, they gotta put it back on before you walk ‘em home, right?”

She gave him a raised-eyebrow look. “All of it?”

He laughed, a flash of real amusement. “Naw. I had a lot of sisters,” he said, giving up the bluff. “I’m real good at braidin’ hair too.”

“Mmm,” she said, amused, and lined her lips carefully before putting the lipstick on. She hadn’t meant to bother, but with him watching her, she couldn’t resist. She did the two-layer waterproof kind, blotting the colored underlayer before she put on the glossy topcoat. It was more than she’d do for a business meeting; usually for those she did nude matte shimmer or the like. But the indulgence of shiny deep-pink lipstick was likely worth it for the grounding distraction it might provide Barnes. Just to balance it, she added a faint smudge of eye shadow in the crease of her eye. It could be a statement, to those who would recognize it— she was trying perhaps a tiny bit too hard to show that she was not too badly injured from rescuing Barnes. Perhaps it was true, perhaps it was good to come down more strongly on his side like that. 

She held her hand out to him. “Now clothes,” she said. “What I look like is important because I _am_ expected to be put-together.”

He nodded. “You were a muckety-muck with SHIELD,” he said. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Been with them a while. Proved myself. Bet a lot of people were surprised when I wasn’t HYDRA, though.”

Barnes shook his head. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. She pulled on his hand, and he came with her down the hall.

“Can you help me get my shirt off over my head?” she asked. “The ribs aren’t so good yet.”

“Sure,” he said, and between her two good hands she couldn’t raise all the way, and his one mostly-functional and one rudimentary hand, they managed not to smear her makeup or wreck her hair. She unfastened her bra, and he didn’t seem self-conscious or shy, but helped her refasten the new one. He was deft, even one-handed, and got it on the first try. “You sure this isn’t too tight over the bandages?”

“It’s fine,” she said, “the pressure isn’t bad.”

Not a single comment about her tits. He was either being respectful, or businesslike. He did look away when she took her pants off, though he did so nonchalantly. “You think they’ll rake me over the coals?” he asked the floor, leaning against the foot of her bed. 

“Probably not,” she said, “but I am sure they’ll impose some asinine conditions.”

“No killswitches,” Barnes said, suddenly fierce. “I’ll stay wherever or have a curfew or anything they want, but no killswitches. Only one who decides it’s time for me to get shut down is _me_.”

She nodded. “Understood,” she said. “I’ll make sure they know.” She pulled the blouse on, tucked it in neatly, then fastened the dress trousers and went to her jewelry box. She didn’t own much real jewelry. Most of it was costume, or expensive-looking fakes, or flashy, or utilitarian to fit different roles. You got expensive jewelry from lovers, and most of those she’d had who were the expensive-gift-buying kind were marks; she normally either sold that kind of thing and banked the cash for emergencies, or turned it over to whoever she was working for. 

Today was classy and restrained modest diamond studs and a string of inexpensive but reasonable-looking pearls. A costume ring, fashionably elaborate, on the middle finger of the right hand, perfectly meaningless. Last touch was a light jacket, a good-quality Chanel couture knockoff. No handbag. She had no need of such things. Security badge in one jacket pocket, small billfold in the other. A knife at her lower back, and a couple of Widow’s Bites and a garotte stashed at her wrists, as usual. Barnes watched all of this with interest. 

“You don’t even go unarmed here,” he said. 

“I do,” she said, “but not in the company we’ll be in. It’s only fair, Danvers can fly and Drew can shoot lightning bolts.”

“You’re modified,” he said.

“Not really,” she said. “Not notably.” Slightly delayed aging, very slightly improved healing, probably-improved longevity, and total sterility. Not much, really. She smiled sweetly at him. She would have been exceptional anyway, she knew that. And it hadn’t made her any smarter. 

“You look really good,” he said, a little uncomfortable. He probably hadn’t seen her in this kind of armor before, she thought. 

“Sit a moment,” she said, and he perched uneasily on the edge of the bed. She came and stood in front of him, nudging his knees aside with hers, and framed his face with her hands, considering him. She pulled his hair elastic out, combed his hair with her fingers, smoothed it down, and parted it carefully, making sure it wasn’t quite straight. His hair was thick, full, and a little wavy, and smelled of shampoo, the same kind Steve used. 

She fixed his hair, putting it carefully back into not too-perfect a ponytail, pulling a couple of chunks out and arranging them to frame his face. She took his jaw in her palms, then, tipping his face up to her. “I will not let them make you a zoo animal,” she said. “Or a pet. Just, whatever you do, don’t lose control. All right?”

He nodded very slightly, looking up at her. His eyes were so blue, so clear. “I got that,” he said. 

“Steve might get goaded into losing his temper,” she warned. 

“I expect he will,” Barnes said, quirking an eyebrow. “A day Steve doesn’t lose his temper is a day he spent mostly asleep, usually.”

She had to laugh, at that, and couldn’t resist drawing her thumb across the full expanse of his curving lower lip. “I admit,” she said, “I have some personal feeling on this matter, but I am most likely not going to let on in that setting.”

He raised both eyebrows at that. “Are you my patroness?” he asked. 

“It would be professionally inappropriate for me to even hint at treating you as a pet or a favorite in any way,” she said. “And after all that, I’m not mussing my lipstick.” She let herself trace her fingers along his cheekbone. “You’re not mine, James, but I would very much enjoy continuing to know you personally as well as professionally.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and licked his lips carefully. 

Her ribs surely wouldn’t take it. 

She let go of his face and stepped back. “Let’s go,” she said. “Walk with me.”


	7. Three Little Words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which assorted Avenger types hear Natasha's defense of Bucky.  
> Featuring numerous cameos by comic book characters for whom I've no idea what the MCU's take is/will be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: mentions of past torture, non-con, violence, and general horribleness. Nothing is really explicit but there's some pretty disturbing shit, done to Bucky, done *by* Bucky, and done by others in his presence with or without his collaboration.
> 
> The pacing of this one is bugging me, and there might be continuity issues because this is an older section that I had to do rewriting in and I don't have a beta so I sometimes give up on checking things in the interests of making a timely update. Anybody wants to help with that, I got a bunch more of this sort of thing I'm working on. I swear it's worth the payoff.

He’d expected it to be hard, but it was incredibly, screamingly difficult to make his body walk into that room. It was an enormous conference room, with floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, and an enormous glossy-topped conference table, marble or mahogany or glass or something impossible. He was walking behind Natasha and was completely unable to control his full-body flinch as he stepped in the door— whatever the room was, it assaulted him with terror and reminded his body, if not his memory, of horrible pain and fear. 

Natasha turned and he stared blankly at her for a long moment, entire body wound up too taut to tremble. “Bucky,” she murmured. “It’s all right.”

He dragged in a breath and set his jaw and visually swept the room, finding the security cameras and hologram projectors and where the dart guns really probably were before he even registered the people. And oh. There were a lot of people. And they were all staring at him. 

They probably thought he was afraid of them. Let them think that. “My mind remembers nothing of a room like this,” he murmured back, lips barely moving, “but my body tells me something terrible happened.” That meant it had been immediately before a wipe. Unsurprising: rooms like this were often in the same building as the types of chambers where they’d… worked on him. 

“I’m sorry,” she breathed; she knew that too. 

“No help for it,” he said, and stepped toward the table, where there were at least twenty people sitting. He knew some of them, he saw Hill and Drew and Danvers from today, he saw Steve and Stark and the reticent Bruce guy, he saw Clint kind of over in the corner. Sam was sitting next to Steve, and picking him out of the crowd pulled at least one tiny thorn, out of all the giant shards, of fear out of Bucky’s throat. Steve might blow up, but Sam would never lose control. Bucky was breathing fast and knew probably half the people at that table would be able to see or smell his fear. A white-haired black woman, a serene-faced white man in a suit— and was that Spider-Man? In costume? Most of them weren’t in costume or uniform, but were just in business attire. He was by far the most shabbily-dressed person in the room, except… well, arguably the stacked dude with the crazy facial hair over there, that guy didn’t look like he gave a shit. Bucky decided he liked him. 

Steve was kind of trying to catch his eye but that was about the last thing Bucky needed right now. He was having a hard enough time keeping from just shutting the fuck down and giving them all robot face. _Brooklyn Bucky,_ he thought fiercely, Brooklyn Bucky from the depths of popular mythology would probably do something charming, maybe a head tilt, maybe look fiercely defiant. He managed to make himself swallow visibly and remember a soldier’s parade rest— too robotic? Too late. He stood behind Natasha and licked his lower teeth nervously behind closed lips, keeping his eyes fixed on the middle of the table. 

“Ladies,” Natasha said, “gentlemen, everyone. James Buchanan Barnes, formerly of the Howling Commandos, more recent alias the Winter Soldier.” And she moved aside slightly so everyone could see him clearly. 

His body screamed at him— it was never good when so many people looked at him, never— and this room— the walls of this room might as well have been dripping blood. Added in his bone-deep certainty that in his present condition it was unlikely he could take any single one of the people in this room in a fight, especially since he was completely unarmed and probably none of them were, it made for a fun party of panic right down the center of his chest between sternum and spine. He set his jaw. 

“Well,” one of the men he didn’t know said, “it is nice to see what all the fuss is about.”

Bucky nodded tightly, completely unable to look up. “Sit down,” Natasha said, taking him by the elbow and steering him to a chair. 

He didn’t want to sit down, he wanted to be on his feet and ready to run. But there was no help for it. He steeled himself, and sat on the edge of the chair, forcing himself to slide back into it, but fuck, it was the kind that had a rounded back and kind of wanted you to lean into it and let it hold you up and maybe sprout shackles out of the arms and—  _no_. No. He managed to keep himself out of the grip of the enfolding back of it, and pulled himself up to the table, putting his elbows on it to give himself the leverage to stay leaned forward. 

This had the effect of putting his prosthetic hideous claw thing front and center. He crossed his arms so it was visible, and tilted his head a little, looking out toward the middle of the table again. The panic beat at him unceasingly but he was here now, he would stay here, he would not be a slave to it. 

“Does it talk?” another man he didn’t know said, and Bucky didn’t have to look up to know that Sam was putting a hand on Steve’s arm right now. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, the little spike of annoyance enough to bring the Brooklyn out where he wanted it. He smiled, tightly nonchalant. “It talks. Any other questions or was that it? We done here?”

Someone chuckled. “I think you asked for that one,” the guy dressed as Spider-Man, who was probably actually Spider-Man, said, amused. 

“Wiseass,” the first speaker said. 

“Gentlemen,” Natasha said coolly. “Let us begin. I present to you first a brief review of the facts, in a timeline fashion. First, James Buchanan Barnes is born in Shelbyville, Indiana in 1917. At the age of 11 he moves to Brooklyn with his family.” Sure enough, over the center of the table there was a hologram projector, and she had some sort of remote or something; it showed slides, starting with a stiffly posed Barnes family portrait circa 1925. Bucky stared at it, hovering enormous in the middle of the table (and if he shifted his head, he could see that it displayed at precisely the same angle to every observer, seeming to follow him as he moved, that was fuckin’ weird)— his father looked shockingly like he did now. Except, he had his mother’s eyes; his father’s had been closer-set. 

He himself was an indistinct blank-eyed child, the only one in trousers among the girls. 

“Sometime not long after that, he meets Steven Rogers, and becomes fast friends with him after defending him from bullies in a fight. Steven Rogers is a year younger than he is but they attend the same school.” Natasha flipped to another slide, which was a less-formal portrait of Steve and his mother, taken on the steps of a building. Bucky remembered the picture, rather thought it was from Mr. Ferguson’s camera, next door. After that was another picture, five or six of the neighborhood kids sitting on the steps of that same building. Bucky was on the lowest step, grinning broadly, probably thirteen, and Steve was next to him, looking solemn. Bucky’s younger two sisters were among the other children; something caught in his chest to see Kitty, who hadn’t survived to adulthood. 

“Barnes is a good student and a loyal family man, working in his grandfather’s machine shop and contributing to the community. He moves out of his family’s apartment because he does not get along well with his father, but continues to contribute to his sisters’ educations. When Steve’s mother dies, Steve and Barnes split the rent on a small apartment so that Steve can afford to stay in art school.” 

This was illustrated with a series of slides that Bucky recognized as drawings by Steve. Some of them, he’d seen— one adorably dorky self-portrait Steve had drawn in a mirror, several cartoonish sketches of Bucky— one caricature of him doing his hair, showing it swept up into an improbable pile of waves on top of his head, another of him patiently holding the mirror for Steve to draw the self-portrait. Some, he hadn’t seen; a truly gorgeous portrait of him using a straight razor to shave, he’d no idea Steve had drawn that, and another that he’d seen only as a still in that video—  a half-rough sketch of him standing looking furious with a cut lip bleeding down his face, his hair hanging down over his forehead, and his fists balled in front of him, knuckles bloody. 

“During World War Two, Barnes volunteered for the 107th New York Regiment,” Natasha said, and called up his service headshot.

“No, I didn’t,” Bucky said, and it was just loud enough.

Everyone was looking at him and he couldn’t look back, so he looked at the picture. 

“Yes you did,” Steve said. 

“No,” Bucky said, “I didn’t. I felt like I should go, everybody was, but I thought it’d be irresponsible, with Dad dead and Mom by herself and the two girls not married yet. But they drafted me and I couldn’t stand to tell you.”

He could feel the weight of Steve’s gaze, all right, piercing among all the others, but he didn’t meet it. “I never knew that,” Steve said. 

“Well,” a female voice he didn’t know said, “there goes my first question.”

“You can tell by the serial number,” Bucky said. “I hadda look it up. I thought it was a false memory. But no, it was real.” 

“Do you have a lot of false memories?” the female voice asked. 

“Yeah,” he said, “sure do. There’s a lot of tricks to figuring out what they are, and the easiest trick of all is just to look it up. It’s a matter of public record, and I can’t figure how the Smithsonian people didn’t find it.”

“That’s how _I_ found out,” the woman admitted. “I spent like five seconds researching serial numbers.”

“You gotta verify sources,” Bucky said. “I’m gettin’ better at it. You shoulda seen my face when I found that porno they made about Stevie and me, I was real confused until I figured out it was probably not real. They made it in the eighties, the historical costume design is terrible.”

“The plot’s not much good either,” a male voice said, and Bucky shrugged. He could do that now, his collarbone was healed enough that it wasn’t agony.

“You don’t watch that kinda thing for the plot, I figure,” he said.

“I’m going to move right along,” Natasha said, but he managed to look over at her and she had an amused eyebrow arch for him. “James Barnes served in the 107th New York Regiment during World War Two, and was rapidly promoted to the rank of sergeant, in part because of his facility with languages, and in part because of his skill at sharpshooting. He, along with a large portion of his unit, were captured by forces later understood to be led by Johann Schmidt, known today to be the original founder of HYDRA. While there, Barnes was taken to solitary confinement, where he underwent a series of mysterious medical experiments and tortures. He was rescued by Steve Rogers, who in the meantime had become Captain America, and together with a number of the other rescued prisoners, became a member of the newly-formed Howling Commandos.”

There were several photographs to illustrate it, all of which were copies of ones that had been in the Smithsonian exhibit. Bucky looked down at his hand, and finally managed to glance over at Steve, who was staring up at the photos with his jaw set. 

“On a mission in 1945 with the Commandos, Barnes was thrown from a speeding train passing over a very, very deep ravine. No body was ever recovered, but Barnes was presumed killed in action, and was given a hero’s funeral with an empty coffin, and a number of posthumous decorations.” Bucky looked up at the picture of all the awards he’d never actually received, and made a face, knowing people could see his expression. “A mere matter of days later, Steve Rogers was lost in the crash of the _Valkyrie_ , and the two of them were enshrined in history as the only two Howling Commandos to die in action.”

The other Commandos’ headshots were shown, and Bucky looked down at the hologram’s weird reflection in the table’s surface, not wanting to think about those guys. 

“Little is known about what was done to him while he was in HYDRA captivity prior to the rescue by Rogers, but it is clear that whatever it was left him able, somehow, to survive the fall. There are only spotty records from this time period, but it seems that he fell into Russian hands, lost his left arm, and either spontaneously lost all memory of his prior existence, or had the memories removed.”

The slides were now images of documents, including one with a photograph of— Bucky’s stomach twisted. An early version of the prosthetic arm. He remembered it, dimly; it had five fingers but only three moved independently, and he remembered that it had been very heavy and very clumsy.

“Barnes himself has only occasional memories of this time, and when we interviewed him, he was unable to construct a coherent timeline. What we know is that sometime before 1952, they created some kind of cryostasis chamber and began using it to preserve Barnes in suspended animation. Some of these chambers have been found and analyzed, and it seems that without heavy augmentation, a human cannot survive the freeze-thaw process. So we know that Barnes has been treated with some variant of the Super Soldier serum that was used to physically augment Rogers, although absent Dr. Erskine’s input, it is unknown how faithful the formula and process was. It should be noted, however, that Barnes appears to display none of the paranoia, excessive aggressiveness, or delusions suffered by other attempts at Super Soldier processes, nor has he suffered any particularly notable physical mutations. He is approximately two inches taller and, minus the metal arm, twenty pounds heavier than the dimensions listed on his military papers.” 

Bucky didn’t know all of this. He hadn’t been given access to these files, and he didn’t know what they were talking about with the paranoid delusions stuff. He looked around the table, at that, but everyone was nodding at the images on the hologram, and not really looking at him. 

“Apart from that, he has a degree of accelerated healing, a metabolism more similar to that of Rogers than that of baseline humans, apparently accelerated reflexes, superior sight, hearing, smell, and possible sensitivity to vibrations, and, well… medical opinion is divided as to whether he has a superior pain threshhold, or merely a great deal of practice at ignoring pain stimuli.” The hologram changed to a video.

Bucky had never seen the footage before. It was security camera footage of a mission in… he didn’t remember. Probably six, seven years ago, though he’d no idea of the passage of time. He was in tac gear, the arm covered, hair short, mask and goggles on, and sure enough, as he advanced across the parking lot, a sniper’s bullet took him in the flesh-and-blood shoulder, spinning him down. He hit the ground, rolled over, leapt to his feet, and brought his own gun up to fire unerringly at the sniper. Then, after staring up toward the camera for a moment, he brought the gun up again and shot the camera out. 

“I remember that one,” he said hoarsely. “Naw, that hurt like a _bitch_ and I was really pissed. I don’t remember why I was there or who those people were but gettin’ shot tends to stick in the memory.”

“How did you know the camera was there?” a man asked. “Do you have modified vision?”

“Heat signature in the goggles,” Bucky said. “I didn’t know it was recording remotely, though. Probably didn’t brief me on that technology. Seriously, though, how could that guy miss the headshot? I was like, forty feet away. That was just _disrespectful_.”

A few people chuckled. Natasha cleared her throat. “Thank you for your input, Barnes,” she said. 

“Ma’am,” he said, touching his forehead in a mock-salute. 

“He definitely feels pain on a pretty standard human level,” Sam said, speaking up for the first time. “I mean, I’m not a doctor, but I’m trained in evaluating that kind of thing, and I just feel like I should clear that up.”

“This is Sam Wilson,” Natasha said, “alias the Falcon, who is in his daily life an employee of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, and spends much of his time as a counselor.”

“I have a whole evaluation of Barnes worked up,” Sam said, “and I can trot that out later, I just had to address that. Medical opinion really shouldn’t be divided, it’s not that hard to figure out. He doesn’t self-evaluate on par with an office worker at the hospital with appendicitis, no, but there are other ways of reading that kind of thing.”

Of course Sam had done a psych evaluation, that was his job. And of course a lot of the times he’d been a sympathetic shoulder for Bucky were also because that was his job. And it was ridiculous to feel a little taken aback and betrayed by it, because Sam had never implied that it was anything but his job. But Bucky still felt a little stung, and looked at his hands. Well, his hand. And his… claw. Thing. He hated this prosthetic but god damn it, he wasn’t saying a damn word about it. 

“Well,” Natasha said. “Thank you as well for your input, Wilson. Whatever his physical augmentations, the key fact remains that they allowed him to survive what we can piece together was a fairly brutal regimen of cryogenic freezing and intensive brainwashing. They used a variety of means to destroy his episodic memory and reprogram him, for various levels of meaning of the word, to carry out missions. The authority controlling him, it is fairly clear, was HYDRA throughout, although it fell under the jurisdictions of several other organizations at different parts of its history. Thanks to cryostasis, Barnes outlived numerous handlers, and it seems that as handlers and technology changed, the means used to wipe his memory, as it was referred to, also varied. It may have initially been as crude as resorting to physical brain damage and crude electric shocks, and brute repetition and simple aversion training to instill new programming, but by the most recent incarnation, there were sophisticated electronic devices that could give his handlers fairly fine-grained control over how much they erased from his memory. And how much they put in.”

There were pictures now, and Bucky could only glance at them— photos from that file, of him in the chair, of him in the tank, of him strapped to tables. There was one that was a video of him undergoing a surgical procedure. There was audio, mostly whited out by the power tools they were using. The sound set his teeth on edge.

“Notable in this video,” Natasha said— it was in color, Bucky could see garish red blood, they were— oh, they were splicing in the metal reinforcement to his collarbone. He looked away.— “is the fact that according to his medical records, they did not use anaesthetic on Barnes, fearing a fatal interaction with his programming. Instead, they performed all medical procedures with him conscious but chemically paralyzed. If you watch closely you can see that his eyes and facial muscles are moving. He is awake. Also notable is the fact that they did not use analgesics or painkillers of any kind, so he is both conscious and fully able to feel everything they are doing to him.”

“Turn that off,” Bucky said, not looking at it. “Romanoff, turn that off. Nobody needs to see that.”

“All right,” Natasha said, but it took a moment to disappear, and not before the audio picked up the desperate, strangled noise of pain Bucky had managed to make through his bite guard right then as they drilled through his collarbone and the drug started to wear off. “There are other disturbing videos, but we will skip them in light of the fact that a description will suffice. The point of them is that Barnes was subjected to a great deal of torture and had no concept of choice about the missions he was ordered to carry out. A consistent issue noted in his file by his handlers is that if he went too long between treatments— by which they meant reprogramming, by whatever means were current— he would begin to reconstruct himself, would begin to recover memories and aspects of what seems to be his actual base personality even in the absence of any memories.”

There were a series of consistent photos of him that looked sort of like mugshots. Bucky didn’t really remember them, but he could tell from the environment, from the traces of camouflage or dirt or blood on his face, and most of all from his expressions, that they were taken immediately before he was wiped. In most he looked sullen, in some he looked tired, in one or two he looked plaintive, and in a couple of them he looked downright thunderous. They were probably the same ones that had been in that one video.

“Several mission reports contain accounts of him turning on his handlers, never in response to injury or fear, but always in response to events. Several times he violently objected to the torture of civilians. On one occasion he took out half of his escort with a rifle while they were engaged in the systematic… torture of civilian targets.”

“Call it what it was,” Bucky said quietly. 

Natasha looked at him. Bucky glared back at her. “Do you remember the incident?” she asked calmly. 

“They didn’t wipe that one out,” he said. “They wanted me to remember what they did to me afterward. No, I still got that one in full.”

“Care to enlighten us?” one of the women asked. 

Bucky stared at the photo of himself that hung in the middle of the table. He was staring into the camera with his face set in murderous resentment, eyes dead blank and jaw tight. “I really don’t,” he said faintly. “I know it was Bosnia. I know the point was to make it look like ethnic, uh, tensions or whatever they were callin’ it. I don’t know who was who, I just know what they were doing was pretty much…” He swallowed hard, looked away. “The worst thing. A bunch of men can do. To a couple of women.” 

Silence fell thick and heavy around the table, and he licked his teeth behind his lips, re-set his jaw, and said, “So I shot most of the men, until they shut me down, and I paid for it, all right.” He wasn’t going to go into detail. There was no fucking way he was going into any more detail than that.

After a moment, the woman who he’d scooped on the drafting thing spoke up, and said, “What about all the accounts we have of the Winter Soldier being the one doing the torturing?”

“We do have those accounts,” Natasha said. 

“Most of those, I only remember pieces,” Bucky said hoarsely. “So I wasn’t out long before, or after. That’s not an excuse, I’m just saying, I don’t remember. I know it happened. I get flashes of it. And they were bad. I remember things like, like a pile of human teeth, too many to be one person, but I don’t know where they came from. And I think.” He had to stop, breathe in, breathe out. “Screaming, and things. I get flashes of it. Shit like— nailin’ people to, to walls.” He breathed in, held it, breathed out. “There’s more, I’m sorry, I— can’t.” 

There was a horrified murmur, and Natasha said, “I believe the picture is clear.”

“No,” the woman said, “if he wants to go on, he can feel free.”

Bucky tried to draw breath to speak but it wouldn’t come. Finally he swallowed hard and said, “Howard and Maria Stark. I, Tony’s face brought it back. I don’t remember the whole thing but I remember enough. It was me.” He was shaking, which was pathetic, and he set his hand flat down against the surface of the table and tried to control the tremors that were running through his shoulders. 

His face wanted to shut down and go back to expressionlessness, and he couldn’t let it, God, he couldn’t let it. He couldn’t shut down, but he was close. He was really uncomfortably close. He chewed on his lip and made himself keep squinting at the holographic image of his own face.

“Barnes,” Tony said, speaking for the first time, and Bucky didn’t know him that well but he was pretty sure it was unusual for Tony to have been silent this long. “You really don’t have to go on.”

“She’s got a good point though,” Bucky said, low and flat. “If they didn’t deserve mercy why do I. That’s the question we’re askin’, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it is,” Natasha said. “Continuing: the Winter Soldier’s true nature and identity, after decades of rumor in the intelligence community, finally came to light during the Insight disaster last year. The Soldier assassinated Nick Fury, with uncharacteristic flamboyance, most likely to draw attention to himself and distract from the final phase of Project Insight. In so doing, he revealed himself to Captain America. He was then given the mission of assassinating Captain America. During the first unsuccessful attempt, Rogers recognized that the man had the face of the long-lost Bucky. The two encountered one another during the crash of the Insight helicarriers, and fought again. According to Rogers, the Winter Soldier’s demeanor changed over the course of the fight, and by the end he appeared to understand who Rogers was, and even rescued Rogers from drowning.”

Bucky looked away. They’d asked him about that, and he’d said he didn’t remember. It still felt like something too private to talk about, he wasn’t sure why. He watched his fingers leaving smudges on the tabletop, and frowned to himself. The hologram was playing various bits of video footage from those fights, and he didn’t want to see. He’d seen most of it. It was all over the Internet. 

“Following the incident, Barnes disappeared. Rogers pursued him, but was unable to find him. However, upon returning to New York, Rogers discovered that Barnes had sent him a series of postcards and packages, comprising mission reports of the attacks he was carrying out on HYDRA installations and personnel during that time period.”

Bucky jerked his head up at that. This, he could handle. This was important. This was current. This wasn’t about what a poor little baby he was. “People keep actin’ like that was some kinda revenge spree,” he said. “Like everyone who deserved that from me wasn’t already dead.”

“Why didn’t you come in first, and coordinate your efforts?” someone asked. He really couldn’t see anybody, the way the light was in here, and he honestly didn’t care if it was someone he knew.

“Because I don’t know who the hell any of you all are,” Bucky said. “You forget, I spent the last seven goddamn decades in a freezer. And if you recall, like half of your precious SHIELD was actually HYDRA anyway— that much, I knew. So who’s to say if I _had_ come in, I wouldn’t just have been putting myself right back into that chair for some reprogramming? Thanks, but no thanks.”

“You should watch what you say about that,” a male voice growled.

“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” Bucky said, pouring on as much Brooklyn-laced disdain as he could muster, “I can’t see a goddamn thing with this thing in my eyes and I probably wouldn’t recognize you anyway, but if you’re gonna fuckin’ tell me _shit_ about HYDRA, I don’t give a rat’s ass who you are, you can go _fuck_ yourself.”

“Bucky,” Steve said. 

“No,” Bucky said, disdain reaching a crescendo. “I just spent seventy-five goddamn years as a goddamn puppet, I’m not fuckin’ around with bein’ fuckin’ _nice_ about this.”

“Man’s got a point,” a woman’s voice said. It sounded like Hill. 

Natasha leaned forward slightly. “So we have a list of known HYDRA operatives, all but a handful of whom have checked out by our research— some are listed, we believe, under aliases, and thus cannot be verified using information we currently possess,” Natasha said. “Barnes categorized them three ways: Confirmed Killed, Injured (or Unconfirmed Killed), or Absent, meaning he expected them at a particular facility but they did not report or were not accounted for. We also have video footage in many cases; he confirmed many of the kills by taking video footage of their faces, and at times finishing them off while the camera was recording. This is not easy footage to watch, naturally, but it is very effective and means in many cases we were able to confirm identities of dead agents via facial-recognition software.” 

There was video footage playing now, and Bucky recognized Dzhankoy and looked away. He didn’t need to see it. He’d watched it on the camera before he’d sent it, and it was ugly and unpleasant, his own bloody hand, his harsh breaths. He remembered that much.

“How did he generate these lists?” someone asked, sounding dubious. 

There was silence; Natasha didn’t presume to answer. Bucky made himself glance up at the screen, tongue between his lips, steeling himself. “A few ways,” he said. “I had a lot of access codes, still. Some of ‘em I’m not sure how I knew, but a lot of ‘em, I was either given, or they just used around me all the time and didn’t worry about. A lot of my information comes from the latter category; it never occurred to anybody, ever, that the wipes might not be permanent and all-encompassing.”

“Are they not?” It was the skeptical woman.

“No,” Bucky said. “They’re all really only as good as the last one, and the longer it is between them, the more I can get back from earlier ones. It doesn’t come back in order, at all, and there’s a lot of false stuff mixed in, and none of it is any kind of coherent, but yeah, I remember a whole lot of shit.”

“So you know HYDRA passwords,” the woman said. 

“I know a lot of HYDRA internal operations,” Bucky said. “I know the passwords, I know the command codes. I know the codes a cell leader uses to summon operatives for an emergency. And frequently, I knew how to access their computer, I dunno, mainframes or whatever they call ‘em now, once I was in an installation, so I could collate the lists and find out who-all was missing.”

“You could get into their mainframes,” the woman said. 

“Yes,” Bucky said. “And I regret this, but I did not have adequate technological knowledge at the time to do more than read the screens. I tried to figure out how to print it out, or send it to someone, or copy it, or something, but I just— I had no idea even where to start, the last time I was given any technological conditioning was in the late 90s, what I knew wasn’t even relevant, and computers have changed an awful lot since then. I’ve learned more since, but at the time, I just didn’t have the resources at my disposal. I memorized what I could, wrote down what I could, and blew the rest sky fuckin’ high so they couldn’t use it.”

“This is why you shouldn’t have acted alone,” the man Bucky had told to fuck himself said. 

“I did what I could with what I had,” Bucky said, “and we’re windin’ up for another round of _go fuck yourself_ here, buddy, so maybe we should head that off at the pass and just quit while we’re ahead. I did what I did because it was the best option available to me at the time.”

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve said, sounding deeply, desperately resigned. 

“But what about all the loose ends that leaves behind?” the woman asked.

“I pissed ‘em off bad enough to get ‘em to chase me,” Bucky said. “That was the plan. And so that whole thing with the SWAT teams and all, and getting shot— that was the point of all of that.” He shrugged. “And I still remember a lot of agents’ codenames and faces, and now that I have access to technology, and can stay in one place long enough to think straight, I’ve been able to track them down.”

“It is worth mentioning that Barnes’s operation has resulted in more damage to HYDRA’s infrastructure than the actions of any other single operative,” Natasha pointed out. 

“I thought we had a fair number of double agents,” the woman said. 

“No,” Natasha said delicately, “they had an enormous number of double agents. Most of them had their ultimate loyalty with HYDRA, and provided us with little usable intel. We had limited success at infiltration. Technically, Barnes here is one of a very few double agents who was on our side. For most of his tenure as the Winter Soldier, he was technically funded by SHIELD.”

“Huh,” Bucky said, unable to keep his smugness from showing.

“The list of agents is available upon request, as is the footage,” Natasha said, “and all of the text of the reports Barnes has made to us since he initiated contact, as well as every after-action report from the recent standoff in New York City.”

Another slide came up, and it was a list with headshots of all the HYDRA operatives that had been captured during the operation in New York City that had broken Bucky. “The action in New York was a tremendous blow against HYDRA, and again almost all the credit for the setup is due to Barnes, including the intelligence that they planned to recapture him by infiltrating the NYPD and dispatching their own SWAT teams. He discovered all of that, and made it possible for us to take counteractions against it.”

The image changed, and it was a series of still photos— Bucky on the roof, facing off against the SWAT team, pistol at his own chin. They were grainy, and must be either video stills or photos taken with a very long telephoto lens. In some of the photos it was possible to tell that Bucky was shielding Natasha with his body. 

“Jesus,” Bucky said, “I look like shit,” not because he actually considered it relevant, but because it was something to say. Because he did, he was haggard and drawn and hollow-eyed and looked absolutely berserk, pale and sweaty and desperate; in most of the images his teeth were bared in an animal snarl.

“Barnes broke his left shoulder quite badly deflecting a sniper bullet meant for me,” Natasha said. “I was injured on the roof, and knowing that the attackers meant to take him alive, Barnes used himself as both a shield and a hostage to buy time until Captain America and the Falcon could provide backup. The leader of the HYDRA team attempted to use a control word to subdue Barnes but he successfully shook off the attempt and regained control of himself. And indeed, reinforcements arrived in time.” She showed a couple more slides, of Falcon’s landing, of Steve looking majestic, of the real police helicopters swarming, and finally a still of the video Bucky had seen like eight times, of Steve holding him in his arms and looking both tragic and impossibly noble. 

“Since that time,” Natasha said, “Barnes has been in protective custody here in the Tower. His prosthetic arm had to be removed, as it contained a killswitch, more or less; it was designed so that when the power source was exhausted, it would destroy itself and poison him. We caught it in time to prevent permanent organ damage, but it meant removing the prosthetic. Stark has studied it extensively and has learned a number of things from it. Barnes was fitted with a temporary replacement, largely because the arm was controlled by a series of neurological implants that when decoupled from any receivers gave him incredibly painful neural feedback. They don’t work properly with the temporary arm, but at least they don’t malfunction so badly.” 

Bucky uncrossed his arms and extended the temporary prosthetic, letting it whirr open and closed clunkily. “Apart from that, he has shown satisfactory improvement in all areas and is considered mentally competent, according to several experts,” Natasha concluded. 

Bucky stared at the claw, working it absently. It didn’t really hurt, that much was true. He breathed in slowly, and let it out in a quiet sigh. The hologram in the middle of the table went dark, finally, and the room lights brightened a little— he hadn’t noticed them turning down. 

“We’re going to take a brief recess,” Natasha said, “and then reconvene for brief discussion and a vote.”

Bucky looked up at her as everyone pushed back from the table and began to disperse to the corners of the room, where there were tables with coffee and water and pastries and things. She came and stood near him, not close enough to be intimate but close enough that he could talk to her without raising his voice. 

“Do I get a vote?” he asked. 

“You do,” she said. “I’m going to take your vote during the recess. Give me just a minute, and then I’ll go over the options with you. When the others vote, they’ll have your preference to work from.”

He looked down at his hands, and nodded. Hand. He just had the one. He hated that fucking claw thing, it was really starting to gross him out. He’d almost rather have nothing, but there had to be something to hook the stupid neural transmitters to. 

Someone was approaching, and he glanced behind himself, using peripheral vision to identify one of the women who’d been messing with the magnetic poetry. Jessica Drew. She’d been HYDRA for a while. He had some questions for her. 

Natasha was looking at her, half-smiling. “You probably have some things to add,” she said. 

“I just need to know one thing,” Jessica said, and Bucky raised his head, and was in the midst of turning to face her when she spoke. 

He couldn’t even hear the words; she had the tone right, and it was one of his override commands, the very worst one, and it snapped his head back and whited out his vision. But he clamped the metal claw down on whatever it was next to and searing pain brought him back to himself, sucking for breath, wrenching his head down so he could look at her through the blinding pain in his skull. 

“Fuck you,” he managed through a mouth somehow full of blood, and pried the metal fingers out of his thigh where they’d torn the flesh, and the next breath came a little easier. 

“I’m sorry,” Jessica said, “I’m sorry, Barnes, I had to know—“ She caught him so he didn’t fall out of the chair.

“D-d-don’t,” he said, trying to keep the metal hand away from her, it wasn’t quite under his control, and unlike the rest of his body that wasn’t under his control, it could do some damage, had done some damage. “Don’t t-touch me,” and Natasha had her arm around him from behind, supporting him while staying out of his reach. 

“What happened?” Steve’s voice came out of the general hubbub, alarmed and angry. 

“HYDRA controls their agents with conditioned responses to code words,” Natasha said, hand on Bucky’s forehead, and his vision was all colored lights like he’d been hit in the head really hard. He blinked slowly, his vision slowly clearing. “It was a rather sensible test, but I wish she’d asked first, we’d already discussed it.”

He’d definitely sliced a big chunk out of his left thigh with the stupid fucking claws, and he had a splitting migraine now and had bitten his tongue. “Fuck you,” he said again, and pulled away from Natasha to sit up, breathing through it, wiping blood away from his mouth. 

“I don’t understand,” Steve said, and he sounded horrified. Bucky blinked up at him, squinting at the too-bright room. 

“The control phrase was supposed to incapacitate him and render him helpless for reprogramming,” Jessica said. 

“No,” Bucky said hoarsely, “that one was supposed to kill me. The one they used on me on the roof was supposed to incapacitate.” He pushed his fingers hard against the spot where his nose met his eyebrows, trying to ease the sharp pain behind both eye sockets. 

“Kill you,” Jessica said, sounding astonished. “They had one to _kill_ you?”

He blinked a couple of times. “Yeah,” he said. “I been practicing… Hurts real bad though.” He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Fuck, I gotta throw up.”

Steve put an arm around him and helped him up, hauling him out of the room. “She could have killed you,” Steve said angrily. 

“She didn’t know,” Bucky said. He couldn’t really put weight on the left leg, he’d definitely fucked it up. He better not have cut all the way through the muscle. He made it as far as the bathroom sink before he lost it, and Steve held him through it, keeping his hair out of his face. 

“She shouldn’t have done it,” Steve said. “Sam, here, can you help him, I have to go murder Spider Woman.”

“No,” Bucky said, “Steve, don’t— don’t go— stay with me.” He wouldn’t ever have said something so pathetic except he knew it was the only way to get Steve not to launch himself into some kind of street brawl with a woman who could shoot lightning out of her hands or some shit. He wrapped his one working hand around Steve’s forearm and hung on grimly, and Steve came back and held him through another bout of nausea.

“This needs stitches,” Sam said, holding a dressing in place against Bucky’s leg. “You got yourself good. Probably gonna need more than one layer of stitches.”

“I fuckin’ hate this thing,” Bucky said plaintively, though whether he meant the prosthetic or his stupid conditioned brain, he didn’t know. 

“How was it supposed to kill you?” Sam asked. 

“Aneurysm,” Bucky said, “I think.”

“I gotta check you out,” Sam said. “I don’t like the way you’re reacting to light.”

“Migraine,” Bucky said. “I practiced this. It gives me a migraine now.”

“You practiced,” Sam said. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “There was like, a set of phrases.” 

“And what, you said them?” Sam asked. He had a hand on Bucky’s forehead now, was looking into his eyes with intent focus. 

“No,” Bucky said. “I can’t.” Sam held his chin in one hand and held up his forefinger, and Bucky knew this trick, so he tracked it with his eyes without Sam needing to prompt him. “They were all in Russian, so I wrote ‘em down and hired a Russian hooker to read ‘em into a tape recorder while I wasn’t in the room. Then I played ‘em back quarter speed, then half speed. I worked almost up to full speed but you can only put up with so many migraines.”

“The man on the roof,” Steve said. “From the fake SWAT team.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “he used the other one, the incapacitate one. This one was the kill one.”

“It was so irresponsible of her to do that,” Steve said, still angry, and Bucky followed Sam’s finger up, then down, still holding on to Steve’s wrist. 

“To be fair,” Bucky said, “I don’t think they usually do more than incapacitate. But I had a history of not going down when I was supposed to. So I guess they figured they needed extreme measures.”

Sam had a little pen flashlight and Bucky squeezed his eyes shut. “Bucky,” Sam said gently, “I gotta.”

“No,” Bucky said, “you don’t. Sam. It’s a migraine.”

“Bucky,” Sam said. 

“Sam,” Bucky said, “they used to manually wipe me by shoving an ice pick up my nose into my fucking brain, and I healed from that, I can fucking deal with this.”

Sam looked at him for a long moment. “Jesus,” he said finally. 

“Most of those years didn’t come back,” Bucky admitted. “They didn’t do it much, I don’t think. Not that I’d know.”

Steve wasn’t saying anything, but Bucky could see his face in the mirror, set in such fierce anger he was almost cross-eyed. He closed his eyes, dug his fingers into his temples again, and said, “I’m good, let’s go back.”

“Bucky,” Steve said quietly, face softening. “Take a minute.”

“I _did_ ,” Bucky said. “I’m not going through this again, we’re finishing this now.”

“When I said you needed stitches,” Sam said, “I didn’t mean you might need some later, I mean you need stitches, kind of now.”

Bucky experimentally put weight on the leg. “It’s fine,” he said. He couldn’t walk without limping, but he could walk, and that was all he really needed. 

 

 

Bucky vaguely registered Natasha complaining to someone that just because the Tower was full of superheroes didn’t mean security could be loosened, but he wasn’t conscious enough to contribute to the discussion. The migraine had wiped him out and he’d eventually let Sam give him painkillers to put the stitches in his leg. Not because he wanted that, but because he knew it was really upsetting Sam. And he was learning that these people were his friends, and he was remembering that sometimes you did things for friends’ sakes. 

On top of everything else, it knocked him out and he fell asleep sitting leaned up against the wall in the little room next to the conference room. He wouldn’t go to the hospital floor, so they’d stitched him up right where he was, and he’d put the bloody torn jeans right back on. 

Natasha had given him his options sitting on the floor while he sprawled in a metal folding chair mostly in his underwear and had a resigned but patient nurse stitch first the muscle, then the skin back together under the light from a desk lamp. 

Option One was basically some kind of parole out in the world but under surveillance and with a tracker embedded permanently, and a prosthetic they promised would look lifelike but have no particular abilities. Since that meant necessarily being separated from Steve, pretty much, Bucky wasn’t interested. 

Option Two was to stay in the tower and work his way up to either a place with the rebuilt SHIELD or possibly as support staff for the Avengers. Steve had mentioned earlier, in passing, that it would be nice to have another sniper with a decent healing factor, as they tended to incur damage to fragile archers. Hawkeye had glowered at him. 

Bucky had voted for option two, not even letting Natasha tell him about the necessarily different options for his arm that went with it. He didn’t really care about that.

They were voting on it while he passed out in the next room over, unattended but he knew fine well not unobserved. He had spotted all the cameras, and was listening as they periodically readjusted position. 

He heard the elevator stop, and open, and someone get off, walking quietly. A man, tall, in boots. Slow, deliberate pace. Whiff of leather. He gave no sign as this pulled him back up toward consciousness, but lay as he had been, breathing unchanged, as the person walked slowly toward him. 

He didn’t know the man, didn’t know his scent or his gait; he wasn’t a regular in the Tower. The man paced closer and Bucky let himself take a deeper breath, swallowing as if stirring in his sleep, then hitched a sigh, letting his eyelids gap a little bit as he shifted position slightly. 

Black, the man was in black, the man _was_ black, tall, approaching at the same deliberate pace. He slowed, and stopped in the doorway, and said, “Don’t think you’re fooling me,” in a deep, resonant voice. 

Bucky snapped his eyes open. “Are you the one they were wonderin’ about?” he asked. “If you were gonna show up?”

“Probably,” the man said. Leather jacket, sunglasses, hat, impassive expression. 

“They said I shot you,” Bucky said, drawing conclusions, “but I don’t remember it.”

“I remember it pretty clearly, as it happens,” the man said. Fury. He had to be. 

Bucky made a wry face. “I’d apologize but I always feel like that’s sort of trite if it’s for something I don’t remember,” he said.

“I don’t stand much on that kind of ceremony anyway,” Fury said. “Why are you bleeding on a floor?”

“Chair’s uncomfortable,” Bucky said. The chairs all had arms, and he’d nearly flipped his shit over the phantom sensation of arm restraints.

Fury gave him a look, skeptical. “Okay, why in this room, then?”

“They’re voting on my eventual fate,” Bucky said. “I don’t really need to be in there for that.”

“Why not?” Fury asked. 

“Better I don’t see who votes which way,” Bucky said. “They figure they don’t want me to know, and I figure for me, it’s better if I don’t know. We agree, at least. That’s somethin’.”

“What about the bleeding?” Fury asked. 

Bucky shrugged. “Stitches,” he said. “Pardon me if I don’t get up, but I’m shot up with horse tranquilizers too, so my balance isn’t what it could be.”

“You’re awfully sanguine about that,” Fury said. 

“If you or anyone else wanted me dead right now,” Bucky said, “I would be. The reaction just now when somebody tried made it pretty clear that’s not gonna fly, so… Turns out resigned acceptance is one of those life skills that just stays useful.”

Fury crouched next to him, which indicated better knees than most guys his (indeterminate, but certainly over 50) age tended to have. “You’re not at all what I expected,” he said. “I’ve watched the footage and listened to the recordings and gotten reports from a lot of people, and none of them really line up at all with what I expected.”

“You didn’t think I’d be _boring_ , did you?” Bucky asked. “Surely you know Steve better’n that.”

“You know,” Fury said, “I don’t think I really did know Steve as well as I thought I did. He’s easy to misjudge.”

“Sure is,” Bucky said. He wasn’t feeling any pain. He wasn’t really feeling his legs at all, was the downside of that. 

“Who tried to kill you just now?” Fury asked. 

“I don’t know her well but I’m told she’s Spider-Woman,” Bucky said. He shrugged. “I’m not mad. I was kinda annoyed at the time but I mean, no hard feelings. She wasn’t really _trying_.”

“You weren’t kidding about the horse tranquilizers,” Fury said, tilting his head back a little to look down his nose. 

“Eh,” Bucky said, shrugging with his eyebrows. 

“And they’ve just left you unattended in an empty room with an open door,” Fury said. 

Bucky shrugged his shoulder this time. “My friends are busy. My enemies are busy. JARVIS is never busy. I’m under pretty intense surveillance, I’m not really worried about it.”

“There are a lot of people who want to hurt you,” Fury said. 

“No shit,” Bucky said. 

“You really put a hurt on HYDRA this last few months,” Fury went on. 

“Coulda done more,” Bucky said. Something else clicked, and he said, “You were workin’ too. That has to have been you.”

“I was out there, yes,” Fury said. “Sometimes a step ahead of you, sometimes a couple steps behind.”

“Too bad we couldn’t coordinate,” Bucky said. “But the thing is, man, you can’t trust anyone. And that means you can’t really collaborate with anyone. That’s just how it is.”

“You trusted Steve, though,” Fury said. “You came straight to him.”

“There’s only so much a man can do on his own,” Bucky said. “And that’s the thing, it’s not that I trust Steve so implicitly, it’s that if it turns out I can’t, I don’t really want anything else out of life. I know he’ll see me dead before he gives me back to HYDRA, and that’s all I really want.”

“I see,” Fury said. He looked… dubious, maybe, was the word. Bucky was too floaty to be concerned. “So they’re voting now on what’s to become of you, and you’re lying on the floor.”

“I’m sittin’ up,” Bucky said mildly. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You trust them to choose what’s best for you?” Fury asked. 

“I trust I got no other choice,” Bucky said. “I sort of figured on that when I picked New York for my last stand. I coulda had HYDRA back me against a wall in any old city if I just wanted to blow my own head off. But I figured, New York meant I could give Steve a chance to do something about it, if he wanted to. And he wanted to. So here I am. I don’t really care, apart from that.”

“You don’t care at all,” Fury said. 

“I don’t,” Bucky said. “There’s no point getting worked up about shit. I stated my preference, they’ll take it into account if they wanna.”

“What was your preference?” Fury asked. 

“Whatever lets me keep watching Steve Rogers’ back like I always did,” Bucky said. “That was the only good thing I ever knew how to do and it’s the only thing I want to keep doin’.”

“You’re not tired of killing people?” Fury asked. 

Bucky shrugged. “It’s my one talent,” he said. “Man’s got to be useful, or he might as well not get out of bed.”

Fury tilted his head. “Fair enough,” he said, and pushed smoothly to his feet. “I guess I should go see how the voting is going. You wanna come in with me?”

“Nah,” Bucky said. “Can’t feel my legs, might as well stay out of trouble. I said my piece already.”

“Can’t feel your legs,” Fury said, mildly perturbed. 

“Horse tranquilizers,” Bucky said. “You’re a very convincing hallucination, by the way. Thanks, this has been entertaining.” 

“What did Spider-Woman _do_ to you?” Fury asked. 

“Don’t worry ‘bout it,” Bucky said. 

 

* * * 

 

There was, of course, an Option Three that Natasha hadn’t told Bucky about, and that was whatever they were doing with hopeless cases now that the Fridge was breached. She was a little angry that there were even people who wanted to consider it. Bucky had been perfect, he had been demonstrably not-brainwashed, he had been brave and honest and angry, and he had obviously not consented to any of what had been done to him. 

Drew’s little experiment should have garnered him sympathy, as well. And it had, and eventually, she could tell, they were going to come around to Option Two. But people had to flap their gums and feel superior and say shit that wound Steve up, which was the real reason Bucky wasn’t in the room. 

Natasha did wish they’d gotten Bucky to go back to Steve’s apartment or to the hospital floor or somewhere, she really didn’t like leaving him alone out there. But she needed everyone he trusted in here with her to keep the discussion on track— even if Steve was just getting angry, he was still highly respected by an awful lot of people and it made his opponents look bad when he got upset— and couldn’t spare anyone to sit with him, even though she would have happily gone herself to sit with his head in her lap and pet his hair. 

He was so pretty.

It wasn’t her usual thing, to let that turn her head, but she was old and tired and hurt and her covers were blown and her old friends were dead, and the new Natasha apparently wanted to be stupid about pretty boys.

She had made herself analyze it coldly, and it did stand up, her thing for Bucky; he really was an asset, he stood to be an invaluable addition to their team one way or another, and he was undeniably not to blame for any of the terrible things that had been done by his body under another’s control. 

But the fact remained, he was lying in an empty room bleeding and alone (she had the surveillance camera closest to him streaming live to her phone) while a group of people who mostly didn’t care about him debated his fate. 

He wasn’t alone. She looked more directly at the feed on her phone. Someone was in the room with him, speaking to him. She called up another camera angle. 

Fury.

Well, well well. He had shown up after all. She smiled to herself, and looked up in polite attention as Richards finished yet another long-winded dissertation on the nature of reform. He was largely on her side, but was taking forever about it. 

Natasha stood up. “Friends, a moment, if you will. I believe we have another viewpoint to be expressed.” She had timed it carefully, and as she finished her sentence, the conference room doors opened and Fury stepped through. 

She smiled. Her work here was done. 

 

* * *

 

Bucky came about half-awake as Steve got down next to him. “Five more min’tz,” he mumbled, mostly for effect. 

“Buck,” Steve said quietly. “You okay?”

“Nothing hurts,” he sighed. He peeled his eyes open and focused slowly on Steve. “‘mI goin’ to prison?” he asked. 

Steve looked briefly horrified. “No, of course not,” he said. 

“‘kay,” Bucky said, and closed his eyes again. 

“Can you get up?” Steve asked. “You don’t really want to sleep here.”

“Isscold here,” Bucky agreed, not opening his eyes. 

“C’mon,” Steve said, making to help him sit up.

“Can’t feel m’legs,” Bucky admitted. 

“They’re still talking in there,” Steve said, “but the vote’s done, pretty much. You’re staying here.”

“Okay,” Bucky said, and smiled at Steve. “Wanna stay wit’choo.”

Steve smiled, a sad crooked one. “You really can’t get up, can you,” he said. 

“Nope,” Bucky said. 

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Steve asked. 

“Yup,” Bucky said. 

“Okay then,” Steve said, and slid an arm around Bucky’s shoulders, and— oh, he was picking Bucky up like a kid. 

That really wasn’t right, Bucky thought dimly, but Steve lifted him fairly easily, getting to his feet with no trouble. He’d carried Steve like that, a time or two or ten, and he absently looped his good arm up around Steve’s neck like Steve had done to him so many times. “Hmmm,” Bucky said, and tucked his head into Steve’s shoulder. 

He was sort of pretending to be more out of it than he was, but he didn’t have to reach very far for a convincing display of confusion as Steve put him down on the couch in his apartment. “Don’t go,” he said pitifully, catching at Steve’s shirt as he pulled away. 

“I gotta get back there,” Steve said. “They’re still hammering out the terms of your stay here. I just couldn’t leave you lying in that room looking dead any longer.”

“Wanna stay wi’ you,” Bucky said. 

Steve put his hand on Bucky’s face, his big warm hand, pushing hair away from Bucky’s eyes, fingertips brushing along Bucky’s cheekbone, along the line beside his mouth. “You will,” he said. “You’re gonna stay with me. I’m just going downstairs, I’ll be right back. Stay here and get some sleep.”

Bucky considered him for a long moment. “Okay,” he said finally. He managed to get his hand onto Steve’s face enough to push at the corner of his mouth. “Thass y’r sad smile,” he said. “Don’t do it. No’ff’r me.”

Steve gave him a real smile, for that, and leaned forward to kiss his forehead, which felt really nice. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back in just a little while.”

Bucky closed his eyes and didn’t watch Steve leave the room. 

He was putting it on, partly, of course, but he truly was messed-up; the migraine had left his head feeling hollowed-out and the stitches were a line of tiny stabs bleeding through the painkillers. He sat up once the door was closed, and called up an interface to JARVIS, and read everything he could find about Nick Fury. 


	8. A Knack For It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bucky gets a haircut, freaks himself out, makes a very young new friend, doesn't answer any of Natasha's plot-related(?) questions, and gets another bagel.   
> Also another visit to Brooklyn, with some flashback Steve/Bucky youthful experimentation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mentions of seizures, accidental threatened violence to a child, and non-vivid flashbacks to more violence.  
> I guess I should give a warning for underage, but it's not non-con or dubcon or abuse, it's two 12-year-olds learning about kissing, from each other, willingly, in a flashback. (And assorted similar adventures as they get a little older.)

There was a weird dinging noise in Bucky’s ear and he twitched, clawing his way out of clinging grogginess toward consciousness. He was on his right side, curled up, with his head resting on something warm and oddly shaped, and it made a weird little dinging noise again and he recognized a cellphone text message notification sound. Not his own, of course. 

Steve’s. His head was in Steve’s lap. “Mmngh,” he said, tasting blood, so groggy his eyes crossed as he tried to open them. 

Steve’s hand was in his hair, and moved soothingly. “It’s okay,” Steve murmured, “go back to sleep.”

It had to be ass-o’clock in the morning. Bucky had tried to sleep in his own bed but had wound up having a horrifying half-lucid nightmare, paralyzed in the bed in Steve’s guest bedroom while Zola laughed and taunted him and ran wires through all of his limbs. He’d spent what might well have been a solid hour trying and trying to scream or struggle or even blink before he’d finally managed to roll out of bed; he’d come to on the floor with his nose and mouth bleeding, his tongue bitten badly and his head splitting. 

He’d had a lot of seizures the first couple of months on his own after the helicarriers, so he recognized the signs now. He didn’t want to tell Steve about it, but he also didn’t want to slip into another one he might not wake from— or, God, into another nightmare like that, he couldn’t face that, it had been so goddamn _real_ — so he’d dragged himself out into the living room and watched mute television for hours. 

Steve had eventually come out and sat with him, and Bucky had held out for about ten minutes before deciding he deserved a treat, and had shamelessly put his head into Steve’s lap. Steve had petted his hair for a blissfully long time, watching the television and absently flipping through channels. 

Bucky hadn’t been aware of drifting off, but he must have, because here he was waking up groggy and sore as fuck to Steve’s goddamn text message notification sound. He groaned again and turned his face against Steve’s thigh, and Steve took advantage of the shift in his position to dig the phone out of his pocket. Steve smelled so good, smelled like himself, smelled like safety. His hand was big and warm, smoothing across the side of Bucky’s head. 

With his other hand he was typing a reply, and he still had the little noise that clicked when you touched a key turned on. Bucky had disabled that shit _immediately_. He thought sourly that Steve probably still had location services enabled too. Goddamned under-paranoid bastard. 

Steve’s phone actually fucking made a noise when a text message was _sent_ , too. Jesus. “You gotta _fix_ that,” Bucky said, muffled in Steve’s leg,  and made himself sit up, rumpled and bleary and Jesus Christ his head hurt like fuckin’ _Hell_. He let himself rub his face and grumble; he was being nice to himself today, rewarding himself for yesterday’s shitshow. 

“Headache?” Steve asked, watching him with a wry expression. 

“Mm,” Bucky said. Understatement; it felt like an ice pick in the back of his eye socket. He knew that had really happened to him at some point but, necessarily, didn’t remember it. He could imagine, though. 

Steve leaned forward and put a finger on his chin, tipping his face up. “Is that blood?”

“Mngh,” Bucky said, pulling his face away, but Steve grabbed his chin and looked closer.

“Jesus,” Steve said, “what—“

“Is it fresh?” Bucky asked muzzily, and pulled back again to scrub his hand across his face. No, it was dried blood, under his nose and by his mouth. “No,” he answered himself. “So don’t worry about it.” He hadn’t really been in any state to notice anything like that last night. He hoped he hadn’t— crap, he’d got blood on Steve’s pyjama pants. Just a bit, though. Maybe Steve wouldn’t notice. 

“Just a nosebleed?” Steve said softly, thumbing at Bucky’s chin, next to his mouth. “Looks like your mouth was bleeding too, buddy.”

“Bit my tongue, probably,” Bucky said. He pulled his head out of Steve’s hand again. “It’s fine, don’t fuss at me.”

“You look hung-over,” Steve said. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Bucky said. He snorted weakly. “I wish I was hung-over. I wish that shit still worked on me.”

“Would it be worth it if it did, though?” Steve asked.

Bucky sighed. “Maybe,” he said. 

“Whoa,” Sam said, coming into the room, “you look pretty rough.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said faintly. He rubbed his face, pushed his fingers back into the middle of his forehead. “Not so loud,” he added, a little pathetically.

“You still got that headache?” Sam asked quieter, sitting down next to him. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. 

“Mind if I try something?” Sam asked. 

Bucky made himself open one eye to look at Sam, who was wiggling his fingers as if to indicate he wanted to touch Bucky. That seemed like a bad idea but then, on the other hand, maybe not. Couldn’t really feel any worse than he did now. “Go for it,” he said, with much the same flat despair as had prompted him to give up and let them wipe him, in the past. 

“Sometimes headaches are exacerbated by muscle tension,” Sam said, and put his hand on the top of Bucky’s head, gently turning his head so it was aligned straight forward, then turning his shoulders so they were aligned with his hips. “So hold still but try to relax if you can, and let me know if I make you uncomfortable.”

“Okay,” Bucky said; he was facing Steve, who was watching in bemusement. Sam put his fingers lightly at the base of Bucky’s neck, put his other palm on Bucky’s forehead, and dug into the muscles at the base of Bucky’s skull. 

Bucky surprised himself by making a heartfelt noise of decidedly-not-distress, eyes crossing slightly. “Holy shit,” Sam said, and moved his fingers down, pressing in little circles. He worked his way down to the base of Bucky’s neck, then used both hands to start digging at the muscles at the tops of Bucky’s shoulders. “Holy shit,” he repeated, “dude, you are not made of human parts, I swear to God.” He slid his hands along Bucky’s shoulders, and said, “Which bits are broken?

“All of ‘em,” Bucky said, pretty much slurring his words. “Mos’ly healed.”

“I’ll try to stay away from the bones,” Sam said, and dug his fingers into the muscles either side of Bucky’s spine between the shoulderblades. It ripped a heartfelt, guttural noise out of Bucky’s chest, but it wasn’t a noise of pain. 

Bucky couldn’t focus his eyes. It hurt, sort of, almost, but it also felt _so_ good. He made another little noise and let his eyes roll back, then closed, as Sam drove his knuckles into a knot Bucky hadn’t realized was so painful. He was definitely making involuntary noises that would have been embarrassing if he’d been able to spare the attention for them, but he wasn’t, so it didn’t matter. 

An indeterminate period passed, at the end of which Sam ran his hands carefully from Bucky’s shoulder blades up to the base of his skull, then patted him and pulled away. Somehow Bucky had wound up leaning facefirst into Steve’s chest. He had no inclination to move, at this point, and wouldn’t have, if Steve’s phone hadn’t chirped at him again. 

“Hnng,” Bucky said, and with great effort pushed himself upright. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “Did I drool?”

Steve laughed, and leaned forward to kiss Bucky’s forehead. “Feel better?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, dazed, and turned to sit properly on the couch. “My, uh.” He took a moment to remember how to talk. “My spine. Where’s my spine?”

“I promise,” Sam said, “it’s still there,” and Bucky blinked helplessly at him. 

“You’re a beautiful person,” he said, mouth moving with zero brain input. He would have been embarrassed but he just didn’t have the capacity. 

“He is,” Steve said, and put his hand in Bucky’s hair, tousling it affectionately. He had his phone in the other hand now, and was looking at it distractedly. 

The inside of Bucky’s head still hurt, but everything else felt a lot better. He hadn’t remembered, had forgotten that it was possible for someone touching you to feel good like that, not sex or pain or fighting. Just good, with no more meaning to it than that. 

Sam was smiling at him, sort of a lopsided and soft expression, and Bucky had a momentary inappropriate thought of what it would be like for Sam to touch him more meaningfully. Hands like that— all that _attention_ — definitely inappropriate. 

“I was gonna shower,” Bucky said, “but I don’t think I can move.”

Steve laughed, at that, and slid over so his shoulder was touching Bucky’s, warm and solid. “I was actually gonna ask if you were up to having visitors today,” he said. 

Bucky collected himself a bit, and glanced at Steve’s phone, which was still in his hand and on a text messaging screen. “Not Spider-Woman,” he said decisively, knowing it wouldn’t be; Steve wasn’t going to be speaking to Jessica Drew for some time, regardless of what she’d intended to do. 

Steve smiled tightly at that, confirming Bucky’s supposition. “No,” he said. “Lakeisha.”

Bucky considered that. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I should probably talk to her.” He rubbed his face. “For that, I’ll get off this couch and shower. Maybe even shave.”

Steve laughed. “That’s a good boy,” he said. 

“Can’t the man even have a morning off?” Sam asked. 

“Oh,” Steve said, “it’s a social visit. She’s bringing Jimmy.”

“Aw,” Sam said, “I _love_ Jimmy.”

“He’s a great kid,” Steve agreed.

Bucky bit his lip. “He’s five?”

“Or so,” Steve said. “A little hyper, pretty biddable though. You’ll love him.” He must have caught something in Bucky’s expression, because he frowned. “You used to get along great with kids.”

Bucky smiled bitterly. “Kids are mostly scared of me now,” he said. He pushed himself up off the couch. “If they’re smart.”

 

Bucky stood in the doorway to the living room, wearing only a towel and with his hair streaming water everywhere. “Steve,” he said. 

Steve looked up almost guiltily from his phone. “Huh?”

“Cut this off,” he said, gesturing at his hair. 

“You sure?” Steve asked. 

“Yeah,” he said. “I can’t stand it.”

Steve looked over at Sam, who was making coffee. “Don’t look at me,” Sam said. “I look like I know white people hair? I don’t know white people hair.”

“I wasn’t gonna ask you,” Steve said. 

“I look like I know more about what Barnes wants than he does?” Sam asked. “Because I don’t.”

“I wasn’t asking that either,” Steve said, annoyed. “I was just gonna ask, if they show up while I’m busy, if you could listen for the door.”

“Oh,” Sam said. 

Bucky laughed. “Steve,” he said, “I think maybe we’re leanin’ on Sam a little too hard, huh? You union, man? Do you get weekends off?”

Sam shook his head, laughing, and Steve looked solemn. “No,” Steve said, “he doesn’t get an eight-hour day either.”

“Don’t even give me that look,” Sam said. “Go cut your boy’s hair and let me have my coffee in peace.”

Bucky went back into the bathroom rather than watching Steve’s answer. He hadn’t figured out their relationship yet, wasn’t really up to knocking his head against it. Steve paused and retrieved another towel from the linen closet, then stood a moment looking at Bucky in the mirror.

“This’d be easier in the kitchen,” he said. 

“Guess so,” Bucky agreed, and handed him the scissors and comb from the medicine cabinet. “You didn’t give yourself that haircut.”

“This one? No,” Steve said. “I pay some girl to do it.”

“I don’t want mine that short,” Bucky said. “And I don’t want it stickin’ up.”

“Understood,” Steve said. He pulled one of the kitchen chairs out and put the towel down on the floor. Bucky sat down where he gestured. There weren’t any arms on the straight-backed kitchen chairs, and that was okay, and Bucky curled the fingers of his hand around the side of the seat and sat perfectly straight while Steve combed his hair out, patiently working the comb through the thick tangles.

Sam came in from the living room, where he had the television on, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He leaned one narrow hip against the counter and watched. “This is sort of cute and domestic,” he said.

“Take a picture,” Bucky said, “and text it to me, I want to remember it later.”

“Fair,” Sam said, and got his phone out of his pocket. Bucky didn’t look up, but he heard the phone beep as it took a picture. “Done and done.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said. 

“You want it just the way I always used to cut it?” Steve asked. 

“Maybe a little longer,” Bucky said. “I don’t want it— they used to just use clippers, I don’t—“

“I won’t cut it that short,” Steve said. “I’m starting now, okay?”

“Okay,” Bucky said, and watched Sam’s feet, clad in white socks, the hems of his track pants skimming the tops of his feet. The scissors were sharp, and didn’t tug much at his hair. Steve was cutting it evenly, smoothly, and he didn’t have to pay attention. If Steve wanted to hurt him, he would, and Bucky had no interest in stopping him.

“Hey,” Sam said, “how’s your leg?”

Bucky made himself use the prosthetic claw to tug the towel up on that side to show the closed wound. The subcutaneous stitches were itchy; they’d been designed to dissolve but his healing was faster than they were intended to handle, so they were just irritating him now, but it was too late to do anything about it. 

“Uh,” Sam said, “where’d the stitches go?”

“Pulled the top ones out,” Bucky said. He’d done that before he’d gone to sleep; they’d been trying to work themselves out anyway.

“Huh,” Sam said. “Just, um. How fast do you heal?”

“Dunno,” Bucky said. “Was never my job to keep track.”

“Will the scar fade?” Steve asked, voice quite close to his ear. 

“Dunno,” Bucky said. “Probably.” He pushed the towel back down, a little clumsily— the fingers didn’t give him much by way of meaningful feedback— and curled the claw around the edge of the chair. 

Something made a little chiming noise, not a phone, and Bucky did not twitch, did not betray any alarm. It was JARVIS, some kind of computer thing. “Romanoff,” JARVIS said pleasantly, and the door clicked, unlatching. Bucky had an instant to be self-conscious about being half-naked in the kitchen, but it didn’t get far; Natasha came through the door, shut it behind herself, and grinned at him. 

“You look better today,” he said. She was moving more smoothly, and her color was better. 

“Are you cutting it all off?” she asked, looking almost dismayed. 

“Not all of it,” Steve said. 

“Just outta my eyes,” Bucky said. “And offa my neck.”

“Coffee?” Sam asked. 

“Did Steve make it?” Natasha was wearing jeans, and a t-shirt, and her breasts were bound somehow but maybe in some sort of loose thing, like a camisole, not a real bra; they were a little lower and softer than usual, but not loose. Bucky made himself look away, it was rude to stare at a woman’s breasts. Breasts were soft. _Stop it._

“No,” Sam said, with a laugh. “I learned the hard way not to let him make it. Just cuz caffeine’s got no effect on him—“

“He always liked it strong,” Bucky said. “But so did I so there wasn’t any reason to learn better.”

“If I wanted to drink tea I’d drink tea,” Steve said, unruffled. He combed through Bucky’s hair again and Bucky could feel the abrupt end where there suddenly wasn’t hair anymore. There was hardly anything left to comb through. Steve was parting his hair now, where it used to part, on the left side. And Steve’s on the right. They’d always been mirror-images like that. 

“If you think weak coffee tastes like tea you haven’t been drinkin’ the right tea,” Bucky said. 

“Have you had proper Russian tea?” Natasha asked curiously, in Russian. 

Bucky raised his eyes without moving his head, to look at her. “I have,” he said, in English, “at least since I escaped. I spent a great deal of time there, hunting them.”

“Before that?” she asked, persisting in Russian. 

“Enough,” he said, stubbornly sticking to English. “I was there enough to learn the language the hard way, at any rate.” He knew that; they hadn’t perfected the procedure to put things into his head wholesale until later. 

“I will have to make you all Russian tea,” she said, giving up and coming back to English. “So that you all know.”

“I feel like that’s a scary thing to offer,” Sam said warily. 

“No,” Bucky said, “it’s actually really good.”

“Doesn’t it have orange juice in it or something?” Sam asked. 

Both Bucky and Natasha gave him puzzled looks. “No,” Natasha said. “Though you’re not the first to ask that.”

“It’s strong,” Bucky said. “And people sit around drinking it for hours. And talking.”

Steve combed hair forward into his face. “Sorry,” he said, “hang on, I just have to—“

“Do what you gotta,” Bucky said, “I got no particular hang-ups about my hair.” He was still hanging grimly on to the sides of the chair, though, to remind him his arms were free, his legs were free, he could leave if he wanted. 

There were sounds of coffee being poured, and he thought about asking for a cup. Would his stomach take it, today? Maybe. He wanted one. It smelled good. He stayed still as Steve cut away the hair covering his face, and combed through what was left. 

“Hey, can you make me a cup?” Steve asked. 

“Me too,” Bucky got out. He was on-edge, he finally admitted to himself, and starting to get panicky, but he was going to fucking sit through a fucking hair cut, he was not going to wind up running around with hunks of hair missing because he couldn’t fucking sit still. 

“Almost done,” Steve murmured, the scissors making their little shushing noises near his ear. “I wonder if we can still get the hair oil you used to use?”

“Ha,” Bucky said, “I doubt it.” 

“Nowadays hair stuff comes in weird little tubes,” Steve said. “Product. They call it product. It sounds really ominous. Look out, here comes the Product.”

“It could be a supervillain name,” Bucky said. “The Product.” 

“Oh no,” Steve said, in his Stage Captain America voice, “the Product has kidnapped the Brooklyn Bridge!” He brushed the loose hair off Bucky’s face, and Bucky looked up at him and laughed. He’d forgotten about Stage Captain America.

“The Product is demanding ransom!” he said. 

“Someone has to stop the Product,” Steve said. 

“What the fuck are you guys even talking about?” Sam asked, standing in front of Bucky with two cups of coffee. He handed one to Steve. 

“Never mind,” Steve said. “Is that product in your hair?”

“No,” Sam answered, puzzled. “What?” He handed the other cup to Bucky. It had cream and sugar in it, and he tasted it carefully. It was good, it was how he remembered liking coffee, and he frowned and looked over at Natasha. 

“How’d you know I take it like this?” he asked. 

She blinked, confirming his impression that she’d been the one to fix it up, then considered. “Didn’t you get coffee when we were at the diner?” 

“No,” he said. He couldn’t possibly have kept it down then, not after all that food. 

She went blank. “I don’t know,” she said. 

“Weird,” Steve said. 

“You still take yours black?” Bucky asked, distracted by the sudden memory of arguing with Steve over coffee. 

“ _Yes_ ,” Steve said. “You never let me take it like that!”

“I never did,” Bucky said, “it was bad for your stomach.”

“Even after the serum!” Steve said. “You were always coming over and putting milk in my goddamn coffee.”

“If we had it,” Bucky said. “Sorry, old habits died hard.”

“He was shameless,” Steve said. “Because he liked it better that way and I always let him finish my coffee when it was like that, because I didn’t like it.”

“Steve had a really weak stomach,” Bucky said defensively. “He couldn’t have a whole cup of coffee, and it was too harsh if he took it black. I wasn’t stealin’ his coffee. The caffeine was bad for his heart and it didn’t need the extra work, I can tell you that.”

Steve ruffled his hair. “I know you were lookin’ out for me, Buck, but after the serum it wasn’t even a problem anymore and you still kept doin’ it.”

“I had a lifetime of conditioning,” Bucky said. He set the coffee down on the table so no hair would fall into it. The distraction of conversation had helped enormously. He wondered if Steve had noticed how tense he’d been. Probably. 

Steve combed through his hair, pulling it straight back and then parting it again. He trimmed a few ends, then ran his palm along the short hair at the back of Bucky’s head. “Almost there,” he said. “Then you should probably hop back in the shower and rinse off, or the hair will itch.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, grabbing a swallow of coffee. Steve made a few more little cuts, then tousled Bucky’s hair with his hands. It was starting to dry. “Whoa,” he said, “my head feels a lot lighter.”

“Did it help the headache?” Sam asked. 

“Kinda,” Bucky said. He did feel a lot better. 

Natasha was sitting in the other chair at the table, watching, and he caught her eye as she smiled at him. “It looks pretty good,” she said. “You could go a little shorter.”

“Let’s leave it at this for now,” Steve said. “You can always cut more off, you can’t put it back on.” He parted it the other way, then ran the comb down the original part and pulled it through Bucky’s unresisting hair.

“Pretty good head of hair for a 90-year-old,” Sam said. It was starting to dry, and it would probably get kind of fluffy, and Bucky didn’t really know what he’d do about that. He’d have to find out about Product. But that could be something for another day. 

“All set,” Steve said, brushing hair off his shoulders onto the towel on the floor. “Go rinse off.”

“Yessir,” Bucky said, carefully getting to his feet. Steve got the dustpan from the hall closet. He rinsed off, scrubbing his fingers through his short hair and feeling weird about it, and when he got out Natasha was sitting on his bed, poking at her phone.

She looked up when he came in. “I brought you your coffee,” she said, pointing at the side table. There were two cups on it, and he recognized the mug he’d been drinking from, which was a plain blue one. “I still don’t know how I knew how you take your coffee.”

“Are you sure we only met the one time?” he asked, picking up the cup. The coffee had cooled to a more drinkable temperature, and he took a long swallow. It really was exactly the way he liked his coffee. 

She nodded. “Not to be creepy, Barnes, but you made a big impression on me.” She was smirking a little, looking at him in a manner that reminded him he wasn’t wearing any clothes, just the same damp towel he’d had on before. 

But that made him pause; he remembered her as a gawky teenager, then. “Uh,” he said. “Does that, uh, make this creepy?” He gestured back and forth between himself and her— he had to use the stupid claw, since his human hand was occupied in holding the coffee cup, and it just reminded him how ugly the prosthetic was. 

She looked slightly alarmed, then amused. “No,” she said, and laughed. “It’s not creepy.”

He chickened out a little and pulled on clean underwear at the same time as he removed the towel. It wasn’t that he was self-conscious so much as that he was, okay, he was self-conscious. He didn’t know if she wanted any of this to mean anything and he was so out of practice at being a human being that he didn’t know how to play any of the games people played. He wanted her, he knew he did, but whether she really wanted him or wanted to amuse herself with him or wanted to be a friend to him or had a use for him, he really hadn’t sorted out at all yet. 

“You think you’ll get your own place?” she asked. 

He looked at her. “I can’t leave the Tower,” he said. He’d understood that much of the terms, out of it as he’d been yesterday; he was still in custody, on a sort of parole, under the authority of the Avengers, pending further proceedings. 

She gestured. “You could still get your own apartment here,” she said. 

“Steve wants me out, I’ll go,” Bucky said with what he could manage of a shrug. “But you know, I had my own apartment for like a month and it was lonely as fuck. Stories make it all romantic like I took Steve in for his own good but honestly I had this shoebox of an apartment and still rattled around in it. I don’t like livin’ alone.”

Natasha tilted her head thoughtfully. “Huh,” she said. “I guess I wouldn’t really have pegged you for a loner if I’d thought about it for more than five seconds.”

“Been workin’ alone long enough,” Bucky said. “I wake up screaming, I’d rather there was somebody who knew me there. I don’t wake up one morning, I want somebody to find me before I bloat. I need a minute to myself, I know how to take a walk, even in this goddamn fishbowl.”

“You won’t be stuck here forever,” Natasha said. 

Bucky shook his head. “Whatever,” he said. Socks. He discarded a sleeveless undershirt; he didn’t need his shoulder exposed anymore, didn’t want it exposed, didn’t want to fucking see it if he didn’t have to. Long sleeved undershirt, loose t-shirt, battered-but-clean jeans. 

He picked up his mug and finished the coffee, then looked mournfully at it. “That was good,” he said. “I want more. I probably shouldn’t have more.”

“Does it make you jittery?” she asked. 

He shook his head. “Hurts my stomach,” he said. He shook his head. “I’m the one with the weak stomach now, not Steve.”

She smiled at him, a little mysteriously, and sat forward on the foot of the bed, looking suddenly serious. “Did you ever,” she said, and paused, lips pressed together as if she wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. 

“What,” he said, wary. 

She regarded him, letting her eyes trail down his torso and away. “I don’t remember clearly,” she said quietly, “but there was— a machine. And you went in it and… dreamed. Do you remember that, or did they not do that to you?”

He stared at her, chewing on his lower lip. “Dreamed,” he said. 

“I, I think we weren’t meant to remember it,” she said. “But it. Sometimes, you woke up and you knew another language? Or how to, say, play piano? And if you searched hard enough you could half-remember… a place. Where you’d learned it.”

He was still staring at her, and realized he should look away, so he did. “No,” he said slowly. “I don’t— remember that.”

“There is no one else,” she said quietly. “No one else from that place who I can ask. I do not know if that was real.”

He dragged his eyes slowly back up to her face. “I am sorry,” he said. “I do not remember.”

She smiled at him again, a sad smile. “It’s all right,” she said, “I may have actually dreamed it.” She slid off the bed and stood, offering him her arm. Her right arm, so he’d have to take it with his left. He did, threading the claw carefully through the crook of her elbow. 

They went out into the main room, and he sat on the floor while Sam and Natasha played a video game.  Steve got a phone call and went into his bedroom to take it, leaving his nice blue hoodie slung over the arm of the couch. Bucky let him get about fifteen feet down the hall before stealing it and shamelessly burrowing himself into it, hood up and everything. He loved that goddamn hoodie, and Steve had noticed and offered to give it to him but Bucky had refused. Steve had bought Bucky one just like it, in black, and Bucky pretty much never wore it; the entire point, which he couldn’t bring himself to explain out loud, was that it was Steve’s hoodie and he wore it all the time and it smelled like him. Bucky only stole it when it wasn’t fresh out of the wash. Nobody had picked up on that yet and he was kind of trying to keep it that way. He was a creepy motherfucker and really didn’t need anyone else to realize that. 

The doorbell chimed, and Sam set his controller down and disappeared. Natasha handed the controller to Bucky and he snorted at her. Like he was going to have a shot at figuring this out, with one hand and one really primitive robotic claw. But he got up, sat up on his knees anyway to see the screen better. She was in the midst of trying to explain how he could use the controls anyway when someone suddenly tackled Bucky from behind. 

Bucky reacted instinctively, ducking and grabbing at the tackler’s shoulder and rolling to let the momentum carry them both forward. But even as he reacted his body told him this was very strange, there wasn’t nearly enough weight to give him the expected momentum and it wasn’t that it was a glancing blow. Even as his reflexes rolled the attacker to the ground and put himself on top, his body pulled the motion so that Bucky put the attacker down gently, flesh and blood hand flat in the middle of a very small chest instead of slamming him down with the claw locked around his throat. 

Because it was a very, very small attacker— in fact, a boy, of about four or five, dark-skinned and wide-eyed and surprised. There was an endless instant of frozen horror as Bucky realized just how badly that could have gone, just now, and by what a slim margin it hadn’t— he would have killed this child, would have instinctively torn his throat out or snapped his neck and nobody could have stopped him. 

Natasha set her controller down. That was how fast it had happened; she, fast as she was, hadn’t yet reacted. Bucky slowly raised his head from the little boy’s surprised face up, up to the entryway of the apartment, where Lakeisha was mid-gesture, mouth open, hands flung out, eyes wide.

He had seen that expression before, more than once— that was the expression people wore when you were about to destroy their world. His horror of himself rose up black and thick, crawling up his chest, in his throat. He had— he had destroyed so many worlds, had seen that look so many times and it had never stopped him. 

Time snapped back into motion and he looked back down to the boy’s face, still wide open in surprise. It took everything he had, but he wrenched himself out of the thick sticky horror and barked out a breathless laugh. 

“Kid,” he said, “I did _not_ hear you coming.” He swallowed down nausea and laughed shakily through it. 

“You are wearing Captain America’s shirt!” the little boy exclaimed, laughing delightedly. Bucky picked up his hand from the tiny warm chest, the delicate little ribcage, and put his palm flat against his thigh so it wasn’t obvious how his hand was shaking. He could have killed that boy. No one could have stopped him. It would have been so easy, would have been easier than what he had done. He wouldn’t even have had to use the metal hand.

But his body had known. Somehow he’d known not to. He clung a little dizzily to that, and the boy bounced to his feet, laughing in bright pure joy. “Mommy! Did you see how he throwed me? I flipped right over!”

Natasha was perfectly expressionless, which for her, he was learning, meant she was badly rattled. Sam was standing with both hands over his mouth. Lakeisha was frozen in place, mouth still open, hands still half-outstretched. As Bucky looked up at her she collected herself enough to say faintly, “He’s— he’s really fond of Steve. I’m— I’m _so_ sorry, Mr. Barnes, I realize just how poorly that could have gone for both of you.”

Bucky exhaled sharply. “He’s just bein’ a kid,” he said. The little boy was bouncing next to him, and ran over and grabbed his shoulder. 

“Throw me again, mister!” the little boy said, curling small fingers into Bucky’s shirt. 

“Jimmy,” Lakeisha said sharply. 

Bucky turned his head and gave the little boy a slow, deliberate up-and-down. “Throw you? I barely know you. What’s your name?”

“I’m Jimmy!” the boy said. 

“You gotta shake hands with a guy when you meet him,” Bucky said, holding out his real hand. Jimmy shook it exuberantly. “I’m Bucky. Pleased to meet you, Jimmy. Jimmy’s _my_ real name but it was my dad’s name too so they always called me Bucky to keep us straight.”

“So are you Jimmy or not?” Jimmy asked fiercely, too loud. 

“I’m a secret Jimmy,” Bucky said, and put his finger to his lips. “Nobody knows. I only told you ‘cuz you’re in the club.”

Lakeisha laughed shakily and came over, dropping down to the floor to pull Jimmy into her lap. “I’m,” she said, “Jimmy’s really rambunctious and I usually hold his hand so he doesn’t run off like that, but my hands were—“

“Hey,” Bucky said, “if I wasn’t safe to be around Steve wouldn’t have told you to bring him. Nothin’ wrong with a kid bein’ a kid.” His hand was still shaking. Lakeisha was still visibly rattled. He made himself take a deep breath and let it out slowly. 

“Hey,” Jimmy said, oblivious, wriggling off his mother’s lap, “are you Captain Ameria’s friend?”

“I am,” Bucky said. “Since we were little kids.”

“That was a hundred years ago,” the boy said confidently. 

“Ninety,” Bucky corrected him. “I’m not _that_ old.”

“He can’t count that high yet,” Lakeisha stage-whispered. 

“Pshh,” Bucky said, “ _I_ can’t count that high.”

The little boy was struck by something. “You’re Captain America’s friend with the _robot arm_.”

Lakeisha covered her eyes with her hand, and Bucky laughed, a more genuine laugh. “I am,” he said. “Or, well— I was. But can you believe it? I broke it.”

“You broke your arm?” the little boy asked, eyes round. 

Bucky pulled the long sleeve back to show the robot claw. “I broke it,” he said. “Stark is repairing it now, so I have this temporary thing.” He opened and closed it. 

“Cooooooool,” the little boy breathed, staring at it. 

Sam and Natasha were both still staring in blank shock. Steve came out of his room, and froze mid-gesture of sliding the phone back into his pocket. Jimmy caught sight of him and yelled, running over to him and jumping at him. Steve caught him, swung him around, threw him straight up and caught him while he shrieked with glee. 

“I jumped on Mister Bucky and he rolled me right over him!” Jimmy yelled. “I flied! I thought he was you but he wasn’t!”

Steve’s expression froze into polite interest, and Bucky saw him register the blue sweatshirt, the hood still up; saw him register Sam’s shaken expression, Natasha’s blankness, but finally his gaze settled on Lakeisha, who’d recovered fastest of anybody (not counting Jimmy of course, who hadn’t ever caught on anything was wrong), and his shoulders came down a little bit. “You landed okay, huh?” 

“Yeah!” Jimmy said. “He’s super old like you are!”

“Is he,” Steve said with a laugh. 

Jimmy leaned in. “He’s a secret Jimmy,” he whispered loudly. 

“I did know that,” Steve said. “I’ve known him my whole life. I know almost all of his secrets.” He looked at Bucky as he said it, and his expression went a little wistful. 

“You know more of ‘em than me,” Bucky said, shrugging. The way Sam was still horrified was kind of making him queasy. He’d never lied, he’d never lied to them, they knew what he was. Lakeisha was the only one not horrified, he realized, because she was the only one who’d never seen him in action as the Winter Soldier. She had no real notion of what had so nearly happened, what he was capable of. He felt sick. 

Lakeisha had moved into the kitchenette with an ease that suggested she’d spent time in this apartment. “My mom gives her regards, Mr. Barnes,” she said, and he finally noticed the brown paper bag she was carrying. She set it down on the counter. “She insisted I bring these.”

Bucky perked up a little. He could guess what was in that paper bag. “Is that what I think it is?”

Lakeisha smiled at him, and pulled out a wax paper-wrapped little package. “Bagels,” she said. 

“Your mom is the best,” Bucky said fervently. “And it’s Bucky, Mr. Barnes was my dad.”

“And callin’ you Jimmy would just be confusing,” she said. “I got ‘em all toasted with cream cheese, hope everybody likes that.” She gestured with one of the packages, hefting it like she was going to throw it, and Bucky held out his hand. She tossed it to him, and he caught it one-handed. It was still warm, and he could smell it— it did more to settle his stomach than anything else had so far today. 

Natasha was suddenly right next to him, regarding the package with interest. “I got enough for everybody Steve told me was here,” Lakeisha said, and Natasha went in and stood next to her. 

“Food is the way to everybody in this tower’s heart, it turns out,” Sam said, coming up behind Natasha. 

“Half of us have such screwed-up metabolisms that we kinda can’t help it,” Bucky said, unwrapping the package and breathing deeply. 

“I’m making more coffee,” Sam said decisively. 

“I would love a cup,” Lakeisha said. 

Steve came over and traded Jimmy for a bagel. Jimmy stayed in his mother’s arms for about a nanosecond before he slid down and came to where Bucky had sat at the table, and tugged at his left arm. “Can I see your robot arm?” he asked. 

Bucky laughed, and said, “Come up here,” and scooped Jimmy up into his lap, hooking the left elbow around him and pushing the sleeve up so he could see the ugly claw-hand. “Isn’t that hideous? I hate this thing. Tony Stark said he was gonna build me a new one.”

“Mister Stark is Mama’s boss!” Jimmy said, tugging at the thumb-claw. Bucky resisted a little, then acted like he’d pulled it open. 

“Wow, you’re strong,” he said. It was weird how normal it felt to have a kid in his lap. He couldn’t really remember the last time he’d held a child. His cousin Mary’s son Michael had been about this age when he’d last been home, before the war. Mary was surely dead, but Michael might still be alive. 

“I’m gonna be real big,” Jimmy said proudy. “My uncle Jeremy is real big. He has a metal arm too!”

“Does he,” Bucky said, thinking back. Yes, Brenda had said her son had been injured. “We should hang out.” 

“He lets me play with it too,” Jimmy said with a grin. “His isn’t this fancy though! Yours has more gears.”

Bucky had no idea, he realized, what prosthetic arms were normally like nowadays. He knew academically that his old one had been more advanced than was the norm, but he hadn’t ever really considered it in any depth. “Really,” he said softly, and looked over as Lakeisha sat down at the table across from him. “I wonder if Tony Stark would make him one, too.” He considered it. “Mine probably wouldn’t work for him. The nice one Stark’s making me.” He made a face, feeling the weight of Lakeisha’s gaze on him. “I have a lot of metal reinforcements spliced into my skeleton. Tony wants to put more in, to bear the weight of what he wants to do. The original ones went in when I… well, let’s just say it wasn’t my idea. I wouldn’t really recommend that to anybody who had any kind of choice in the matter.” 

“I see,” Lakeisha said. Jimmy pushed the thumb claw back toward the other ones. “Jimmy, be gentle.”

Bucky made a wry face. “He can’t hurt me, don’t worry.” He shrugged the bad shoulder. It was mostly healed. He lifted the arm and pretended to grab Jimmy’s face with it, growling like a dog. Jimmy shrieked with laughter and grabbed his arm around the wrist, pushing it away. Bucky tussled with him a little bit, and wound up dangling him off the floor for a moment. He abruptly let Jimmy down to the floor. 

“ _Oh_ -kay,” he said. That had been a bit too much on that collarbone. “Okay, I know I said you couldn’t hurt me, but you’re heavy, kid. You want roughhousing, you go see Steve. He’s not healing any broken bones at the moment.”

Jimmy gave him a slightly-worried big-eyed look, the most solemn Bucky had ever seen from him. “You’re hurt?”

“I broke a bunch of bones,” Bucky said, “and they’re almost all better, but that’s why I have to wait for the new arm. I can’t hold a lot of weight yet, and my real robot arm is really heavy.”

Jimmy looked at his arm, then up at his shoulder, holding the metal forearm in a surprisingly gentle grip. “I don’t want you to be hurt,” he said, lip pushing out in a slight frown. 

“Aw,” Bucky said, and ruffled Jimmy’s fuzzy-curled hair with his flesh-and-blood hand. “Well, I’ll keep that in mind. Go get Steve, he doesn’t get climbed on near enough.”

“Okay,” Jimmy said, brightening, and ran off. 

Bucky watched him go, then turned back to Lakeisha and said “Is he for real?”

She laughed. “That’s my real baby,” she said. Her look was a little calculating. “You seem pretty used to kids.”

He shrugged. “I had a lotta cousins,” he said. “And my sisters were starting to have kids when I… well, left.”

“We should contact that cousin,” she said quietly. “I looked into it. There’s him, and he lives locally, and then one of your sisters has a couple of kids who still live locally.”

“None of them would remember me,” Bucky said. “Johnny might. The others, though, they’re after my time.” He twisted the wax paper from his bagel up into a little ball, frowning. 

“You had a pretty big family,” Lakeisha said. “Were you all close?”

“Oh yeah,” Bucky said. “We were…” He screwed up his face. “Yeah,” he said finally, exhaling bleakly. “We were pretty tight.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

He remembered something. “You were writin’ a paper,” he said.

She laughed. “It’s kind of on hold for the moment,” she said. “What with the promotion and all. I’ll finish it up once I get the department up and running.”

Bucky frowned. “School’s important,” he said. “I never knew anybody who got a Master’s degree.”

“Everybody gets ‘em now,” Lakeisha said. “Almost nobody gets this kind of career opportunity. I’m not sorry to postpone it. Don’t look at me like that.”

Bucky eyed her narrowly. “You’re gonna have the best goddamn thesis anybody’s ever had,” he said. 

She laughed. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t doubt it. But business first.”

 

* * * 

 

_Brooklyn, 1929_

 

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Bucky said, kicking his feet and leaning on the fire escape railing. “I kiss people all the time, why should I care if it’s some girl I barely know?”

“Naw,” Steve said, and he was sort of dreamy-eyed. “It’s totally different. It ain’t the same _at all_.”

“Mouths are just mouths,” Bucky said, drawing up his vowels a little to sound more like Steve. He was getting better at it; he rarely got made fun of for his accent anymore. Compared to Indiana, everyone here talked sort of… sharply. He was getting the hang of it. “Faces are just faces. My mom kisses me, my sisters kiss me, I don’t care. I don’t get it.”

Steve shook his head. “You’re missin’ the point,” he said. “It’s about love.”

Bucky considered that. “I love my mom, though,” he said. “I mean, a lot more than I’d love some twerpy girl.”

“Not that kind of love,” Steve said. “I love my mom too, that doesn’t mean I want to kiss her _like that_.”

“Like what?” Bucky asked, making a skeptical face at him. 

“Like, _kissing_ kissing,” Steve said. 

“What’s the difference?” Bucky asked, frowning. 

“When you seriously kiss a dame,” Steve said, “you put your tongue in her mouth.”

“Ew,” Bucky said, shoving back from the railing a little to give Steve an incredulous look. “No way! That’s disgusting.”

“It’s sexy,” Steve said. 

“Man,” Bucky said, “I don’t follow you at all, that’s just crazy.”

“That’s what’s different, though,” Steve said. “When you kiss family because you love them, you keep your tongue in your mouth. When you kiss somebody you want to make love to like sex, then you, you know. With tongues.”

“I feel like I gotta go to Confession just from sittin’ next to you, Steven Rogers,” Bucky said. “Where you hear about stuff like that?”

“I pay attention,” Steve said. 

“To crazy things,” Bucky said. One of his sisters tried to climb out the window then and he had to push her back in and then his mother yelled at him and they had to go inside, but it wasn’t so bad— his mom liked Steve so much she let them get away with all kinds of things. Steve was probably the best thing about this new place, as far as Bucky was concerned. 

 

They had similar conversations intermittently over the course of the next few months, with movies sometimes bearing Steve’s point out and sometimes not. Neither of them had older siblings to ask, and Steve’s mom was a widow, and Bucky’s parents weren’t that kind of demonstrative, and anyway Bucky would rather die than breathe a word of such a question to either of them. He reluctantly conceded Steve’s point, that this was a real thing people did, after some rather keen observations around the neighborhood, but adamantly refused that it would be something he ever wanted to do.

Until, one fine day nearly a year later, it was.

“I get it now,” Bucky said, stepping forward and leaning over the fire escape railing. Steve startled; Bucky’d come up on the side with his bad ear, he realized. 

“What?”

“I said,” Bucky said, and moved over to Steve’s left side and sat down. “I said, I get it now.”

“Get what?” Steve asked. 

“You remember,” Bucky said, “when you told me about kissing dames and I said you was crazy?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, then looked at him again. “You didn’t!”

“I did,” Bucky said, smug. 

“Who?” Steve demanded. 

“Margie Sanderson,” Bucky said. 

“Really,” Steve said, a little wondering. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, biting his lower lip. “It was— I get it now, Steve.”

Steve looked a little wistful. Bucky had, recently, abruptly gone from being just a bit bigger than him to a whole lot bigger than him. Steve still looked like a kid, but Bucky got mistaken for older than he was all the time. So even though Steve was a bit more… precocious in terms of his understandings of interpersonal relationships, Bucky got a lot more of that kind of attention. This wasn’t his first kiss, not by a long shot, but his physical appearance had outpaced his actual development to the extent that everything up to now had been fairly chaste and childish. It was only because girls mature faster than boys, and it clearly wasn’t Margery’s first time on this particular ride, that this new stage had even been reached. 

“I told you,” Steve said, “it’s different, right?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said fervently. He wasn’t a bad student, he was pretty articulate as far as fourteen-year-olds went, but he completely lacked the vocabulary to discuss the slick, soft heat, the wet excitement, the living tremble of another mouth, the way it went straight to the gut and kickstarted all sorts of neurochemical alchemy. He was still sort of tingly in places he wasn’t quite used to feeling tingly in. 

Steve was looking at him wryly, sidelong, and Bucky said, “Aw, Steve, I don’t mean—“

“No,” Steve said, “Buck, don’t— you can tell me. I wanna hear about it.”

Bucky thought about it. “I don’t really know how to describe it though,” he said. “It was— it was—“ He gestured. 

Steve laughed. “You’re such a poet,” he said, and climbed to his feet. “C’mon, Mom said if our homework was done when we got home she’d make breakfast for dinner.” Now that they were old enough to be on their own they got to go to Steve’s house after school, and it had vastly improved Bucky’s relationship with his sisters. Absence truly did make the heart grow fonder.  

Bucky followed him in and sat down next to him on the sofa, kicking at his school bag. “There’s not much homework,” he said. 

“Yeah,” Steve said. He looked a little wistful. “Did she close her eyes?” he asked. 

Bucky considered it. “I dunno,” he said. 

“You gotta take better notes next time,” Steve groused, but he was laughing. 

“I guess so!” Bucky said. “I didn’t know there was gonna be a test.”

“I always gotta crib from your notes,” Steve said. He pulled out the book they had to read from, and set it down next to himself. “Was it her idea, or yours?”

“Hers,” Bucky said. “I didn’t even figure out what she wanted until she pretty much went for it.”

“Hmm,” Steve said, sitting back on the couch, looking thoughtful. “Did you—“ He bit it off, and flushed bright red. 

“What?” Bucky asked, curious. 

“Nothin’,” Steve said. 

“Jeez,” Bucky said, “I’m worried I did somethin’ wrong now, like there’s all this stuff I didn’t even think of.” 

“If she didn’t hit you,” Steve said, “you did it right.” 

“Next time I promise I’ll make the most of it,” Bucky said. 

“You think she’ll want to do it again?” Steve asked. 

Bucky shrugged, and gave him a cocky grin. “Somebody will,” he said. 

 

Sure enough, somebody did; the very next week Kay Shanahan invited Bucky to walk her home after school, and he showed up half an hour late at Steve’s place with his ears still bright red. 

“Yeah?” Steve asked, a little incredulous; he’d been waiting on the steps. 

“Shh,” Bucky said, scrambling through the door behind him, mindful of the nosy grandmother who lived on the first floor. “Yeah!” 

“You dog,” Steve said, grabbing his arm and running up the stairs with him. He was breathing hard at the top, but not wheezing, so there wasn’t really any reason for Bucky to keep his arm around him, but he did; he always worried about Steve’s breathing. 

“Okay,” Steve said, shutting the door and leaning back against it, looking up at Bucky, “you gotta tell me everything.”

“I paid better attention this time,” Bucky said. 

“And?” Steve asked, tipping his head. 

“She did just what you’re doin’ now,” Bucky said, struck by the resemblance. 

“Oh yeah?” Steve looked amused, something coy in his expression. “Should I pretend to be her?” 

“It’d be easier,” Bucky said, laughing. 

“Okay,” Steve said. “Pretend I got prettier hair.” He tilted his head back, fluttered his eyelashes. “Did you, you know. Touch anything.”

“I kinda let her lead,” Bucky said. “I dunno what I was supposed to be tryin’ ta do.” He took Steve’s hand and pulled it up, setting it on his shoulder. “She kinda pulled me down and went for it.”

“Did you, you know, with the tongue?” Steve asked, pulling a little bit at Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky came in closer and looked down at him and thought, disconcerted, that Steve was actually a lot prettier than Kay. 

“She did,” Bucky said. “She started it, I mean.”

Steve laughed, and Bucky was helpless to explain any of it, but he put his hands on Steve’s hips like he had for Kay, stepped in a little closer, and followed the pressure of Steve’s hand on his shoulder down. Steve made a little noise, but it wasn’t protesting, and when Bucky was in range he tipped his head forward a little and made contact, lip to lip. 

This time Bucky was paying attention enough to register that he’d closed his eyes. Steve parted his lips and licked tentatively at Bucky’s mouth, less assertive than Kay had been; Bucky opened up and let him in, and it was both exactly like and completely unlike it had been with either of the girls, because it was Steve and he wasn’t nervous but his heart was threatening to pound out of his chest. Steve breathed in sharply through his nose and put both hands on Bucky’s chest, but he wasn’t pushing, he curled his fingers in Bucky’s shirt and pulled him in. 

A hot tingle ran right down Bucky’s spine and settled with a heavy feeling in his groin, and he curled his fingers around Steve’s jaw and pushed his tongue in deeper, pressing his body closer to Steve’s. Steve’s mouth was hot and alive and slippery just like the girls’ but even better, he was familiar and not at all intimidated or ashamed, not furtive or hurried; he opened up and luxuriated in Bucky’s attention, with an affectingly sweet little noise, and pressed his body against Bucky’s. 

“Like that?” Steve said finally, breathless, looking up at Bucky with an amused sparkle in his eyes and his lips, red and shining, curved in a smile. 

“Kinda,” Bucky said, and he was just as out-of-breath as Steve was. “Only, she wasn’t as good at it as you are.”

Steve laughed. “I’m a natural,” he said.  

“You are,” Bucky said, and then he noticed that his body was still pressed up against Steve’s, and he was also in a bit of a, um, awkward condition. “Uh,” he said. 

Steve’s gaze went distant, and he fidgeted— he’d noticed, he’d definitely noticed. “Did, uh, that happen?” he asked. 

“Um,” Bucky said, face burning, and he pulled away a little bit. “Kind of. Not… quite so much. We didn’t, um, for so long.”

“Otherwise, though,” Steve said, “about like that.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “About like that.”

“Well,” Steve said. He unwrapped his fingers from Bucky’s shirt. “If you need practice, I guess I have a knack for it.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Yeah, you do.”

 

“How do you know this stuff?” Bucky asked, breathing hard. Steve laughed up at him, half-under him on the couch, lips very red and eyelids heavy. 

“I pay attention,” Steve said, shoving his hips up a little, “and I got a real good imagination.”

“That you do,” Bucky said, running his palm up Steve’s side and rubbing his thumbs across the bumps of Steve’s ribs. He lowered his mouth to take Steve’s again.

“Nngmph,” Steve said, almost a moan, as Bucky’s hand came up to his chest. 

“Her tits weren’t really any bigger than yours,” Bucky said with a laugh.

“Not the point,” Steve said, “it can’t feel that much different to the person _with_ the tits, now can it?”

Steve’s chest was just all ribs. Bucky was lying, Fanny’d had a bit more going on up top than that, but not a whole lot, just a little bit of cushioning over the bones. She was a skinny girl, but no less forward for all that. Bucky ran his fingers across Steve’s nipple, and he jerked ticklishly and made a little moaning noise, pretty similarly to how Fanny had reacted except that after a moment she’d pulled away and pushed his hand back down. 

Steve wasn’t going to scold Bucky for not being a gentleman, though, so he kept rubbing, and Steve writhed underneath him. “She didn’t like that?” Steve asked, panting, but he wasn’t wheezing, so Bucky didn’t worry. 

“I think she did,” Bucky said, “but she didn’t want to let on, y’know?”

“Ah,” Steve said. “Well. I ain’t gonna stop ya.”

Bucky laughed. “I know you ain’t,” he said. “Seein’ as you ain’t a dame.”

“Don’t you forget it,” Steve said. 

 

It didn’t take long for Bucky to get farther with Steve than he ever had with a girl, but he figured that didn’t count really; he was only taking out the intervening step and doing what he normally did when he got home after these things and was alone. When it got to where he couldn’t really stand it anymore he unfastened Steve’s trousers and got his hand inside and did for Steve what he normally did for himself, because Steve’s equipment was pretty similar to his (they’d swum together enough that he knew that). 

“You didn’t,” Steve panted, bucking up into his grasp. 

“Naw,” Bucky said, “just you, she don’t got one of these.”

“Oh my God,” Steve said unsteadily, “Bucky—“

He was wrong, doing it to Steve wasn’t really like doing it to himself at all, it was a whole lot more exciting. Steve was hot and alive and a little unpredictable and both incredibly arousingly other and reassuringly, comfortingly familiar, and he trembled in Bucky’s grasp and Bucky had his handkerchief out already because he knew where this was going.

“I, Bucky—“ Steve said. 

“Shh,” Bucky said, “I got you, c’mon,” and he’d never really noticed it when he did it, but Steve’s whole dick kind of pulsed when he came, and he caught the mess in his handkerchief and had about three seconds to get his own trousers unfastened before he was doing the same, gasping and shuddering. 

He kissed Steve lazily, then, as they both came down from it; they were both pretty good at kissing by now, and he’d never encountered this before, the langorous sense of well-being you got when you shared an orgasm with another person. By himself he normally just rolled over and fell asleep, but with another person there, with their heartbeat slowing next to yours and their breathing mingling with yours, there was a completely unexpected luxuriousness to it that was almost as good as the sex itself was. 

And it was a Saturday, and they had another probably eight hours before Steve’s mother came home, and nowhere to be and nobody to see them at it, so Bucky wrapped himself around Steve and let himself savor it.

 

As the years went by, Bucky got to be pretty in-demand as a date. He was a good dancer, he usually had a little money, he cleaned up nice, he was from a decent family, and he was a well-behaved, gallant fellow. Ladies of a more adventurous nature discovered that he was skillful, considerate, and not pushy in the slightest. He mostly ran with a good crowd, and though he tended to brawl a bit, rarely drank to excess and didn’t tend to hold grudges. His only weakness was an unswerving loyalty to his best pal, and an occasional annoying tendency to try to set up dates with the guy, who was by all accounts kind of a nobody. 

He was long past the need for any kind of practice, and even though Steve never had much luck finding a girl who wanted to finish up even one date with him, he certainly didn’t need the practice either by this point. And yet Bucky still usually wound up reviewing with Steve at some point. 

“I’m not your girl,” Steve said, breathing hard, sitting up. They were in Bucky’s apartment. He’d gotten his own place as soon as he could scrape together the money, because it was that or murder his father. He’d gone full-time at the machine shop the same day he’d graduated high school, and had moved out the same week. Steve spent a lot of time at Bucky’s apartment, but never slept over. 

Bucky stared at him. “I know you’re not,” he said. “Jeez, Steve, if you were a dame I’d be pretty alarmed.” He laughed, and rubbed his palm across the bulge of Steve’s underwear-clad erection. 

“Sometimes I feel like you think I’m your girl,” Steve said stubbornly, and he looked really upset. Bucky knew fine well it wasn’t anything he’d said; neither of the two of them had said a word in a good half-hour at least, and Steve was bright red straight down to his breastbone. He was gorgeous like this, all peaches and cream complexion, the blood under his skin making him look healthier than usual, his eyes sparkling and his lips so, so very red.

Bucky shook his head. “I’m not confused about this at all,” he said. 

“Well, then,” Steve said, “what the hell are we doin’?”

Bucky shrugged. “Does it matter?” he asked. “It feels good, don’t it?”

“I ain’t queer,” Steve said, still breathing hard. 

Well, that was something Bucky had been trying pretty hard not to think about, because it wasn’t the kind of thing a young man who still sort of idly expected to live a conventional life wanted to be. He made himself grin so it wouldn’t show that it had kind of unexpectedly stabbed him in the chest to hear Steve reject the word like that. 

“I never said you was, pal,” Bucky said. “But we’ve always done this, haven’t we? We always shared everything. It never seemed wrong to you before, why should it now?”

“I,” Steve said, “I don’t know,” and kind of faltered. “It just, it seems kind of… I’m not your dame.”

“I hope I haven’t given you any reason to say that,” Bucky said. “I’m not tryin’ to make you somethin’ you’re not.”

Steve looked uncertain. “I, I get comments,” he said. 

Bucky had heard some of them. His instinct was to ignore them, largely, but anyone who got insistent wound up with cause to regret it. “Nobody’s got any reason to say anything,” he said. “Except they’re jealous that you’re pretty. You can’t help it, Steve. I know, look at me. I know it’s a burden being pretty.” He made a face, fluttered his eyelashes. 

“Jerk,” Steve muttered. 

Bucky leaned in and when he wasn’t rebuffed, kissed him again, sliding a hand around his neck. “It ain’t your fault,” he murmured. “Just ‘cuz they all got ugly girlfriends.”

“I ain’t pretty,” Steve groused. 

“Sure you are,” Bucky said, “but not like a girl.” He sat back a little, licking his lips, knowing Steve would watch his mouth. “Hey. I got somethin’ I wanna try.”

“What kinda somethin’?” Steve asked suspiciously. 

Bucky pushed Steve down onto his back. “Somethin’ I learned from a dame,” he said. “That you can’t do _to_ a dame. Figure I can prove to you I definitely don’t think you’re a dame, hey?”

Steve laughed. “I guess I can let it go,” he said. “You never gave me any reason to say it, you’re right, I shouldn’t blame you.”

“Lemme prove it anyway,” Bucky said, because just going ahead and doing it was a good way to distract himself from the thought that he’d been thinking about doing this to Steve pretty much ever since Ida Lawrence had got through doing it to him. And yeah, there was no way that made Bucky not queer. Except that he’d returned the favor for Ida, and had definitely not minded one bit that she was most definitely female— in fact, he’d really enjoyed that particular aspect of it. He really liked what was inside girls’ underpants. But he also really liked what was in Steve’s underpants. 

 So if there was a kind of queer that meant you liked both, that was what Bucky was. But that wasn’t something he was going to think about. 

“Okay,” Steve said, a little hesitant, and Bucky pulled his underwear down his hips. “What do you want me to do?”

“Lie there,” Bucky said, and leaned over. 

“Oh my God,” Steve said, as Bucky swallowed him down. “Oh, _oh_ my God, _Bucky_!”

There was nothing ambiguous about it. There was nothing not queer about it. Bucky had his lips wrapped around a cock, and his hand, and he was turned on almost past bearing, and this was exactly as satisfying as he had thought it might be. He was probably enjoying doing this even more than he’d enjoyed having it done to him— and he’d enjoyed that a lot. 

Steve gasped and shook and swore, and tasted so good, not at all like Ida had— she’d been sweet-tangy, and Steve was all salt and skin; she’d been soft high gasps and little exclamations, and Steve was familiar low grunts and curses and one strong hand wrapped itself in Bucky’s hair, alternately too tight and gentle, contrite. 

“Bucky,” Steve said, desperate, narrow hips hitching up, “Bucky!”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and he was every bit as turned-on as he had been when he’d managed to get Ida off; he’d nearly gone off in his pants untouched, and he was close now too, painfully close. He swallowed Steve down as deep as he could manage and pumped furiously with his hand, and Steve’s whole body went stiff, hips surging up, spine locking. 

Oh, it tasted so strange— harsh and almost chemical, thick and choking, and Bucky swallowed instead of gagging on it. Spitting it out would have meant tasting it for longer, and he couldn’t stand that. Steve shuddered, fist too tight in Bucky’s hair, and made probably the best noise Bucky had ever heard him make. 

“Oh my God,” Steve said dazedly, shivering, “Bucky, oh my God.”

Bucky wiped his mouth smugly and sat up. “See,” he said, “definitely—“

“Come here,” Steve said, and flopped a hand at him, then sat up on one elbow and grabbed Bucky’s dick through his still-fastened trousers. Bucky shut up immediately and made a strangled noise, because he was so achingly close. 

“Steve,” Bucky said unsteadily, and Steve unfastened Bucky’s trousers a bit clumsily and stuck his hand in, jerking him hard and fast. “Steve— _Steve_!”

“Yeah, c’mon, showoff,” Steve said, and Bucky choked off a cry and came so hard his vision whited out for a moment. 

He came back to himself enough to dazedly curl himself around Steve and pull a blanket up before they passed out. 


	9. Bleeding Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a lot of crawling around in airshafts, but not from the usual suspects; Bucky both gives and gets relationship advice from the Hawkeyes; and Bucky makes attempts toward normal living, which mostly involve copious amounts of sex with Natasha and also dressing like a real live person. Mostly sex, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the bit with Kate so long ago, and have been dyyyyyyying to post it because I think I'm hilarious. Sorry it took me longer than usual to get it up, there were RL obligations this weekend I hadn't budgeted for.

 

Someone was in the ventilation shaft. Bucky cocked his head and listened to the almost-imperceptible rustle. It was near-silent; he’d never have picked up on it if whoever was up there hadn’t fumbled and almost dropped something. Whatever it was hadn’t hit any surface, had been caught in midair, but the scrabble of the intruder scrambling to catch it had made just enough noise to register. 

If Bucky had been listening to music, as he often was, he wouldn’t have heard it. He wasn’t, at the moment; he’d been absorbed in a novel about flying shapeshifters, of all things. But not too absorbed to hear someone in the air shaft.

He retrieved the knife he’d managed to pickpocket from Steve’s laundry pile, which he kept strapped to the back of his headboard. It was a nice military-issue ka-bar style knife in a Kevlar sheath. He pulled it out, and tilted his head to track the intruder. He had no shoes or socks on, and was just in a t-shirt and one of his pairs of jeans. Hardly conducive to combat, but silent at least.

Whoever it was had passed over the bedrooms, and was out of hearing range now. Bucky stalked into the main area, a bit relieved to find that Sam wasn’t in there; he’d likely have had to speak out loud if he had been, and that would’ve given up the game. He wasn’t actually afraid; anyone in the ventilation shafts would have had to get through building security, and was likely to be someone who at least wasn’t actively a hostile. But whoever it was would be much better off coming to the door and ringing the bell like a normal human. Steve had made some comment about Natasha liking to use the ventilation system to get around. 

If it was Natasha, Bucky wouldn’t yell at her, but anyone else he’d scare within an inch of their life. He couldn’t really fight with this prosthetic, but he’d done plenty of damage without it in the past. If nothing else it would serve as a club.

And he’d always been just as good a right-handed knife fighter as he was with his left.

He tilted his head, suspending his breathing. The ceiling was higher out here— well, really, the floor was lower, for reasons he’d never figured out— so it was harder to hear, but he was eventually rewarded with a near-silent scrape toward the kitchenette area. He went and crouched on the counter, out of the sightline of the vent there, bare knife in his right hand, silent and waiting and ready. 

A light blinked near his eye— JARVIS. He reached out and touched the holographic light, and a message came up that simply said “Hawkeye.” 

Bucky nodded, and settled himself to wait. The vent cover made a quiet noise, and Bucky admired how skillful Clint was at removing it. The guy was good, no lie, but Bucky was better. He had a sneaking suspicion his hearing exceeded normal human parameters, so for anyone else, it would have been a flawless approach. 

But the fact remained, he’d heard him. And while Hawkeye had taken a bullet rescuing him, he still wasn’t going to let him get away with breaking into Steve’s apartment. 

The grate was pulled out of the way soundlessly, leaving a space that Bucky eyed speculatively. He could fit through there, but nobody would expect him to be able to. 

There was a hint of motion in the opening; Hawkeye was checking to make sure the coast was clear. Bucky held his breath again, finding the hunting instincts easy to fall into. They weren’t all Winter Soldier. He was finding that about a lot of his supposed assassin skills— they were old instincts, old knowledge. The false memories were mostly sinking to the bottom or floating to the top where he could skim them off, and a lot of what remained was ample testament that young James Barnes had been a pretty fucked-up guy from a pretty fucked-up place. There’d been a lot of raw material for HYDRA to work with. Or Department X, really. Whoever had done the bulk of the programming. Most of that predated the fancy electronic mind wipes. They’d just used old-fashioned psychological and physical torture, before that. Bucky had it all back, oh yeah.

Hawkeye apparently considered the approach safe enough; a shadow moved, and then with a quick soundless flip, a body came out of the vent and landed with perfect poise on the floor. Bucky twitched, but aborted all motion and sat stunned motionlessness on the counter:

It wasn’t Clint, it was a young woman with a brown ponytail and a purple bodysuit. She saw him and yelled, “Fuck!” and fell back against the other counter. 

“Who the fuck are you,” Bucky said, but he knew. This was the other Hawkeye. JARVIS hadn’t lied. 

“Jesus,” the girl said, putting a hand to her chest. “What the fuck.”

“I heard you over the bedroom,” Bucky said flatly. “I almost killed you. Knock on the fucking door next time.”

“I’m not here to talk,” she said, some of the readiness going out of her stance. “Jesus. You _have_ to be Bucky.”

“You seen me before,” Bucky said. He flipped the knife from an underhand grip to an overhand grip and back, still crouched on the counter. “You gotta be Hawkeye.”

“I am,” she said. 

She could be fifteen, she could be twenty-five. Modern women, it was really hard to tell, and they didn’t play by the social cues Bucky knew. She was cute, but she was also competent. And she had that glossy, self-possessed look that meant she was probably a brat. He flipped the knife a couple more times. It didn’t have the balance his old ones had. He’d liked those. Steve probably had them somewhere, along with the rest of the stuff that had been on him when they’d brought him in. He would ask for them back soon. But not yet. 

“If you’re not here to talk, then why are you here?”

“I was supposed to leave a note,” she said, and produced a neatly folded sheet of paper from somewhere behind her back. Bucky looked at it, looked at her, flipped the knife again. He only had the one hand, effectively; he wasn’t going to embarrass himself trying to take a sheet of paper with the shitty prosthetic he had. 

“Note from who,” he said. 

“Hawkeye,” she said. 

“You just call each other that?” he asked. “It’s not weird at all?”

“No,” she said, “it’s not weird.”

“Doesn’t get old at all,” Bucky said. 

“No,” she said. “Lots of stuff gets old, but not that.”

“Weird being on a team with another sharpshooter?” he asked. “Don’t you just, I dunno, do the same stuff?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “we actually work really well together when Clint’s not doing just plain dumb shit. We’re both pretty good hand-to-hand. And I can drive like a motherfucker, provided it’s got wheels. Boats, I leave to Hawkeye. He’s great at boats.”

“You augmented?” Bucky asked. 

She shook her head again. “Just a plain old human,” she said. She lifted a challenging eyebrow. “I hear tell you weren’t a bad sharpshooter when you were just a plain old human either.”

“I could hack it in hand-to-hand too,” Bucky said. “Did all right. Didn’t ask for all this shit.”

“I know you didn’t,” she said, but she wasn’t embarrassed or taken aback. 

“Kate Barton,” Bucky said. “No. Bishop.”

“Bishop,” she confirmed. “I’m not related to Clint. Ugh.”

“Fuckin’ him?” Bucky asked, curious. Did the Avengers have a fraternization policy?

“He could be my dad,” she said, curling her lip. 

“I’m going to be ninety-seven this year,” Bucky said, “that kind of thing doesn’t always mean anything.”

“For normal humans, it still matters,” she said, but not unkindly. “No, he pretty expressly said we’d be a good team because he doesn’t want to fuck me. Seemed to matter to him.”

“Probably good thinking,” Bucky said. “Been a while since I let my dick do the thinkin’ but I know how that goes.” Steve Rogers, probably. Didn’t bear thinking about. He put the knife down and held out his hand. “You seem okay, Hawkeye.”

She handed him the paper, her youth showing in the restrained glimmer of triumph in her eye. She was totally checking Bucky out, too. Young enough to be his great-granddaughter, wasn’t she? Even at his chronological age it was a stretch, he likely had ten years on her and that mattered, still, at her age. “You seem okay too, Barnes.”

Bucky gave her a wink. “I could be your great-great-grandpa,” he said, and unfolded the note. 

It was handwritten, which didn’t surprise him. “Yo,” it said. “I know Natasha is the Black Widow and all and you’re a crazy ex-assassin and all and she’s tough as anything and would kill me for writing to you. But if you could find it in your heart to treat her good you’d have me on your side. Not like I’ve got any kind of power, and not like she needs me getting involved, but I’m surprisingly useful and you know, she is a human person, deep down under all that.” It was signed with something messy that might have said Clint’s name, a stylized H that might have stood for Hawkeye, and then said “p.s. Burn this, I’d be much obliged.”

Bucky laughed. “Is he seriously—“ 

“It didn’t make much sense to me either,” Kate said with a shrug. “I don’t know Natasha well, I didn’t think anybody knew Natasha well, but Clint’s really amazingly perceptive about people. If he thinks there’s something between the two of you—“ She let that trail off.

“Oh,” Bucky said, “I’ve totally been in her pants, I just didn’t figure it was ever likely to happen again. He seems to think it will.”

“You have?” Kate looked shocked. “Lucky,” she said in a moment, eyes a little glazed. 

“Oh,” Bucky said sincerely, “I _know_. It was the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me and I’ve been gettin’ in girls’ pants since the ‘30s.”

“I bet it was,” Kate said. She blinked. “Er. Not that I’m gay. But, _Natasha_.”

“Don’t say her name three times, that summons her,” Bucky said, making a show of looking up at the ventilation shaft. He reread the note, laughed to himself again, then tore it into strips and balled them up, popping them into his mouth one at a time.

“What are you doing?” Kate asked, staring at him. 

“You don’t burn shit you really want gone,” Bucky said, chewing. “Anyway I’m the fucking Winter Soldier, you think they let me have matches?”

“They let you have an eight-inch knife,” Kate pointed out.

Bucky picked it up, looking it over. “Girl,” he said, “this is four inches, don’t let boys lie to you like that.” 

She snorted and almost fell over. “Jesus,” she said, catching herself against the cabinet. 

“You think they let me have this?” Bucky asked. “I fucking stole it. If Steve knew I had it he’d take it away, but then what would I have to greet the bogeys in the airshaft with?” He raised the ineffectual prosthetic. “Not like I could do any good with this thing.”

“Fair point,” she said. “Why’d they take the other arm away?”

“It was poisoned,” Bucky said. He popped another ball of paper into his mouth and made sure to chew it, making a face as he swallowed it down. “You gotta chew ‘em,” he said, “by the way, to make sure the ink dissolves.”

“They poisoned your arm,” Kate said. 

“Built-in killswitch,” Bucky said. He went back to absently flipping the knife. “Hey, why didn’t Clint just text me?”

Kate shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably worried that Natasha’s got his phone rigged up. She can read everyone’s texts, she just always knows everything.”

Bucky tilted his head. “Fair,” he said. He was pretty sure she’d been through his phone a couple times. “I take it Clint’s shoulder’s still bad?”

“Not up to crawling through the airshafts,” Kate said. 

“He and Natasha screwin’?” Bucky asked. 

Kate shrugged. “They have a couple times, I think,” she said, “but he has a girlfriend, or he did, and he’s always hooking up with random truly awful women, so whatever they’ve got isn’t that kind of serious.”

“I know what kind of serious that means,” Bucky said. 

“Mutual life-saving and all,” Kate said. “He has referred to her occasionally as his work wife.”

Bucky nodded, satisfied that he understood the situation. “I guess I should send him a note back,” he said, and shoulder-rolled backward off the counter mostly to see if he could with one arm. He could. He landed, flipped the knife, and wandered out into the living room area. “Know there’s a pen and paper somewheres.” 

Kate followed hesitantly. “You could just give him a verbal response,” she said. 

“Wouldn’t Natasha have ways of hearing?” Bucky asked, raising an eyebrow at her. 

“He’s not in the Tower,” Kate said. “He’s back in his building. He doesn’t hang out here that much.”

“Ah,” Bucky said. He looked up at the living room’s ceiling vent, calculating. Yeah, he could get in this one. “The air shafts around here mostly a pretty consistent size?” 

“Mostly,” Kate said. She frowned. “You’d never fit.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow at her. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “Anyway, like I trust your estimation, Little Miss Eight Inches.” She laughed. He flipped the knife again, eyeing the grate, then laid the knife down on the coffee table and sat down to write on the notepad there.

He wrote, “Thanks for the note. I’m flattered that you think Natasha will want anything in particular to do with me. I’m also flattered that you think I have any kind of notion of being good to anybody, least of all myself. I’ll try to live up to the second, especially if the first comes to pass. And if I ever manage to be useful, I’ll be useful for you.” He signed it “J.B.B.”, which was his old signature. It felt weird, but he liked it. Then he added, “p.s. Burning isn’t the best way to dispose of a document, ask Hawkeye how I got rid of your note.”

He folded it up and handed it to Kate. “Show me how you get the grate off so you can just pull it back on,” he said.

She shrugged, stood on the coffee table, and manipulated the clasp. “It’s not difficult,” she said. She pulled a little magnetic clamp out of her belt and jumped to affix it, so she could pull herself up more easily. She hauled the grate up behind herself and carefully slotted it back into place. 

“I see,” Bucky said. “Thanks.” 

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “Nice to meet you.” And with that, she was gone. 

He listened to her leaving, and stared at the grate for a while. Hawkeye thought Natasha would want to involve herself with him. Well, she had gone to a lot of trouble for him thusfar. 

 

* * * 

 

Something was wrong. Natasha opened her eyes from a dream of her mother, and stared into the dimness of her bedroom in the Stark Tower apartment, blinds drawn and curtains closed, weapons ready to hand, room secure, and there was something wrong. 

She lay perfectly still, listening. No movement, no disturbances in air currents. No incorrect shadows, no light where it shouldn’t be. She breathed carefully, tasting the air. No unusual scent… hint of something maybe, a sharp scent, a man’s deodorant maybe. It was fleeting, and she couldn’t capture it again. 

It had been plausibly the scent Steve wore, was the thing, and she had one of his sweatshirts over the back of her chair, but surely she wouldn’t still be smelling it if it had been in the room with her all along, that wasn’t how human noses worked. She pushed herself up, moving slowly enough to be silent, and put her feet on the ground. One of her pistols was in the nightstand, of course, but another was in a pocket on the box spring, so she pulled that one out and held it behind her back. She was in pyjamas, cute ones, a lace-trimmed cami and matching lace boyshorts, hardly suitable for visitors but if it was an intruder they were likely to be distracted, or at least expect her to be more vulnerable than she was. Nobody expected to get their ass kicked by a mostly-naked woman. Like clothing was somehow necessary in hand-to-hand combat. 

Just meant she didn’t have anywhere to hide weapons. She grabbed a sheathed knife from the bookshelf nearest the door and stuck it into the flimsy waistband of her panties. No time for anything more elaborate. JARVIS ought to have warned her if there was anyone anywhere in her apartment. 

She edged out into the hallway, silently pushed the doors of each spare bedroom open (she had them empty, still. She had no visitors and not that many possessions), gave the bathroom a cursory check— she had glass shower doors, nowhere for an intruder to hide— and slunk carefully down into the main area. She checked the sightlines. No visible presence in the kitchen. From the other angle, there was a mirror— no one in the living room.    

Perplexed, she put the gun up and murmured right at the AI’s noise threshhold, “JARVIS, apartment status?”

An interface came up, showing a floor plan of her apartment. There was one dot in it. Herself. She frowned at it. “Approaches,” she said, and the floor plan widened to show the hallway. Someone walked past, unhesitating and purposeful, farther down the hallway, and got into the elevator. 

A dot suddenly winked into existence in one of the spare bedrooms. “Fuck,” she breathed, and flattened herself to the wall. The holographic display blinked at her, though, and said, “BARNES”. 

She frowned at it, pushed the corner so it disappeared, and stalked down the hall, annoyed. Barnes. How the fuck had Bucky fucking, Apparated or whatever into her spare bedroom?

The door was still open, as she’d left it, so she slunk along the wall to check the sightline, caught a flash of movement, and brought her pistol up to aim at his face as he appeared in the doorway. 

He held his right hand up mutely, solemn but unconcerned, and held up the prosthetic claw-hand too for good measure. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. He was barefoot, in a plain black t-shirt and faded dark-wash jeans that fit him properly, recently-shaved, hair clean but messy, unstyled, all fluffy and cowlicked, and he looked good enough to eat, mouth curving, t-shirt skimming the muscular planes of his torso, eyes completely free from fear or worry.

“Knocking on the door wouldn’t have startled me,” she said. 

“No,” he said, “but there’s no sport in that.” She realized he could see that the safety was on. Most people wouldn’t have noticed but of course, by his body language, he had. That explained the spark of amusement that had kindled in his eyes.

“You didn’t come in through the air shaft,” she said. 

“Sure did,” he said. He tilted his head, running his tongue over his lower lip. “You got these rigged up pretty nice. I put ‘em back after I came through.”

Of course he’d known how to disable the goddamn sensors. And the booby traps. She shook her head. “I hadn’t thought you’d fit in there,” she said, and pulled the knife out of the back of her underpants, turning to put the knife on the shelf and wandering into her bedroom to put the gun back into its place on her box spring. She knew his eyes followed her. She knew damn well her ass looked spectacular in these underpants.

“I fit a lot of places people don’t expect,” Bucky said. “There’s an art to moving in a small space.” 

He had certainly looked at her ass, but he was looking at her face now, not letting his gaze linger anywhere in particular. He looked a lot better, less pale, less poisoned, less fragile, stronger. Her ribs would probably withstand another go-around with him. It was tempting. “So you broke into my apartment,” she said. 

“Finally got someone to show me how not to break the vent latches,” Bucky said with a shrug. And that was progress— he’d been doing an odd head tilt instead for days, because his shoulder was still so fucked, but he showed no sign of pain now. Not that he ever did, but even the little mostly-invisible tells were absent now.

“Who?” she asked.

“Kate-Hawkeye,” Bucky said. “She’s a good time.”

“She’s too young for you,” Natasha said fiercely.

“Oh,” Bucky said, rolling his eyes a little, “definitely. What is she, twelve? I can’t tell with modern girls.” He wasn’t rolling his eyes at her, but at the thought of Kate. Good. 

“She’s barely twenty,” Natasha said. She had zero maternal instincts but a protective streak several miles wide when it came to young women like that. She wasn’t close at all with Kate, but even the thought of what men could do— had done to her, at that age— was enough to make her jaw hurt. 

Bucky shook his head. “The shit I got up to at her age,” he said. He half-smiled. “I like to think I’m smarter than that now.” 

“At her age,” Natasha said, but did not continue the sentence. She just shook her head. She’d never had a youth like that. Bucky was standing in her bedroom doorway, shoulder leaned against the door frame, arms crossed, and the way he was angled, he didn’t block the exit. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said, apparently sincere for the first time since the brief flash when she’d accosted him with the gun. 

She gave him a look. “You didn’t do it,” she said. “Unless you mean, sorry for breaking into my apartment, in which case I’ll accept your apology contingent on your reason being good.”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know that my reason is good,” he said. “I wanted to see if I could, was exploring the vents, wanted to see if you were all right. I’ll show you how I disabled the booby traps, though, if that helps.” He made a wry face, self-deprecating amusement. “I am sorry, I suppose it’s a terrible invasion of privacy.”

She sighed, and sat down on the bed. “I do it to Steve all the time,” she said. “I suppose I can’t be angry.”

“You can always be angry,” Bucky said, with a sweet tilt of his head. He had to know precisely what he was doing to her; he flirted like this by reflex sometimes, now that this part of his persona had grown back, but she flattered herself he didn’t do it quite so intensely with other people. “It might make you a hypocrite, but that’s still your right.”

She relented and gave him a half-smile. “Since I have your permission,” she said, “I won’t bother being angry.”

His expression shifted to a slightly warmer one. “Good,” he said. “I don’t want you mad at me.” 

The tilt of his shoulders, the counterpose of his hips, long legs crossed at the ankle, the curve of his neck and the angle of his smile— he had come here to see if she’d let him seduce her. Certainty crystallized as she looked him over and his mouth curved a little more: he was watching her look at him. 

She jerked her head. “Come here,” she said. 

He looked faintly alarmed, then unsettled, then uneasily interested, and shoved off the door frame, stepping carefully into her room. She’d noticed before that he wouldn’t enter uninvited. Breaking into an apartment was one thing, but walking into a woman’s bedroom was different? 

She moved to the edge of the bed and caught a fold of his t-shirt, pulling him closer until he was standing right at the edge of the mattress, between her knees. She hitched forward a little, until he was between her thighs, and put her hands at his waist, looking up into his face. 

“You came here for a reason, didn’t you?” she asked, tipping her head back a little. He kept the left arm down at his side, but brought his right hand around to skim from her shoulder to her neck. 

“I came by this way to see if I could,” he admitted. “But if I’d failed, I’d’ve come to the door and knocked because I wanted to know how you were doing.”

“I’m healed up,” she said, “more or less.” 

His mouth curved, at that. “I meant more generally,” he said. 

“What, you want to know how well I’m doing at following my dreams?” she asked, trailing one of her hands up from his waist across his taut belly and up to his chest. 

“Maybe,” he said, eyebrows quirking. “It’s so long since I had any of those, it’d be fascinating to hear about ‘em.”

“Whoever said follow your dreams never had no dreams like these,” she said with a laugh, quoting a t-shirt she’d once seen and wished she’d bought. She’d never let herself buy memorable clothing like that, not unless it meshed perfectly with a persona.

Bucky laughed. “My dreams are pretty fucking awful, if we’re talking about that kind,” he said, and a clearly-involuntary shiver somewhat destroyed the effect of his nonchalant amusement. 

“Let’s not, then,” she said. “You wanted to know if I’d sleep with you again. That’s what you want to know.”

“Well,” he said, mouth curving in amusement. “Little more general than that. You went to an awful lot of trouble for me, so obviously you want something from me, but what that is, I can’t really figure out.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m not all mercenary,” she said. “It’s not all transactions.”

His mouth pulled awry, and he said, “I keep fucking that up. I don’t mean it like that. I mean, you’ve won my loyalty but I don’t know what you want it _for_.”

“I don’t really know either,” she said, letting it go; he wasn’t accusing her of using her body to control him, at least. He probably hadn’t been lying about his type being girls who fed him; her having fed him when he was hungry and protected him when he was vulnerable had probably done more to genuinely secure his loyalty than the sex had. They both knew what was really important in this world. 

“Well,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t involve too much torture or brainwashing, I look forward to finding out.”

“I should warn you,” she said, “I’m not actually the most together person, emotionally speaking.”

“I think you know precisely how together I’m _not_ ,” Bucky answered. 

“I’m just saying,” she said. “You’re going to want to make other friends.”

“I plan on it,” he said. “I’m not the jealous type, Natasha.”

“Good,” she said, sliding her hand up around the back of his neck and pulling him down to kiss him. 

He had such a good mouth, he really did. He teased her lips open with his tongue and took her mouth, swirling his tongue with firm preciseness that made her hitch her hips up closer to his. 

It only took a moment before she leaned back and tugged him into the bed with her. He grinned, and followed her down, pressing his long lean body against hers, propping himself easily on the prosthetic elbow to leave his right hand free to skim up her side and across her breast, pushing up the camisole. 

She hummed a little, pleased at the contact, and arched into his touch. He chewed on his lower lip and watched her. “You all healed up?” he asked. 

“Mostly,” she said. “Enough to do this, finally.”

“I’ll be gentle with your ribs,” he said. 

“Just don’t be too gentle,” she said. 

He laughed, and sat back a little, lowering his head to her breasts. “I won’t,” he said, “don’t worry.” He had such a good mouth. She moaned as he worked his way down her torso, kissing and sucking at her breasts, then along the edge of her ribs where the bandages weren’t, and then down to her belly. 

“Oh,” she sighed, arching up into the warm wetness of his mouth, the soft sucking pressure as he pulled gently with his mouth at her taut skin. 

He looked up at her from under his lashes, smirking. “Mind if I spend a little while down here?”

“Depends what you spend that while doing,” she said. 

He tilted his head almost wistfully. “I kind of just want to eat your pussy for, like, an hour or so,” he said. “Can I just— We got time, right? Nobody’s tryin’ to kill us?”

She laughed, astonished. “Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, and sighed, gazing at her cute lace underpants. “I just, I just wanna, you know. Get in there. Used to be, like, my favorite thing.”

“Would anyone ever say no to that?” she asked. 

“Sure,” he said. “Not everybody wants me in their underpants.” He licked his lips.

Fuck being coy. “I do,” she said. “I’m not stupid.” She tangled her fingers in his hair gently, pushing it back— it was silky, fluffy and thick, satisfying to work her fingers through. “You have my permission to spend as long as you like.”

He grinned at her, tongue running across his lower lip, and curled his fingers in the waistband of her underpants. “You’re the best,” he said. 

True to his word, he settled in for the long haul, wrapping one of her legs over his shoulder and getting comfortable. He took his time, unhurried, teasing and licking and letting it build slowly. She rocked her hips up to him, relishing the slow build; eventually he brought his hand up and pushed his fingers slowly into her like he’d read her mind, like he knew she needed more. 

She kept her voice under control at first, but her breathing started to get away from her, gasping harsh and intermittent and fast. It was only a matter of time then before she couldn’t keep from moaning, and as pleasure collected in her spine, curling her toes, arching her back, she let go of her restraint and let her throat make what noises it would. 

She came with both hands in his hair and her body shuddering, but it didn’t stop him; he slowed, kissing slow and deep at her apex, pulling softly at her labia with his lips, and as soon as her body stopped jerking he began moving his hand again. 

She moaned, sliding her hand down to caress the side of his neck, and he made a low, rumbling, satisfied noise and licked back into her. It took a moment for her to realize that in fact he didn’t plan on stopping. Most partners took orgasm as a punctuation, not a challenge, but he seemed uninterested in moving on to something that would get him off. She hadn’t expected he literally meant to keep at it for an hour. 

“Oh, my God,” she said, as he turned the intensity right back up, fucking her with tongue and fingers and bringing her back to the edge. “Oh— _God_.”

She’d never been the sort of person who had multiple consecutive orgasms, except sometimes when she was taking care of business on her own and managed to get just the right angle and intensity and headspace. It wasn’t something she’d ever pursued with a partner, that was never what it was about— she used sex for a lot of things, though fewer (and arguably, healthier) things than she had in her old life, but simple orgasms wasn’t ever what it had been about. But his hand and his mouth tripped her over the edge and this time it rebounded, crashing over her in successive waves like the tide, and she shuddered and shuddered and wrapped her thighs around his head and eventually dragged his head up by the hair and held his arm immobile with her thighs. 

“Oh God,” she panted, “God, fuck, yes, wait— fucking _Christ_ , Bucky.”

He gave her a dazed look that slid slowly into a grin. “You’re fuckin’ amazing, Natasha,” he said. 

Forming a sentence was beyond her, so she dragged him down into the bed instead, and rolled on top of him, attacking the buttons of his jeans. “Fuck,” she said, and her hands were shaking, her whole body was shaking. He grabbed her arm, then let go, caressed her shoulder, then slid his hand around the back of her neck, pulling her down to kiss her gently, sweetly. 

“Natasha,” he murmured. She rubbed her palm against the front of his jeans, feeling how hard he was, the way it made him twitch. “Beautiful, glorious Natasha.”

“Fuck,” she said, breathing against his mouth. He tasted of her, tasted of sex, and he kissed her deeply and thoroughly and completely without any urgency whatsoever. She, on the other hand, was shaky and twitchy and wound-up. “I want,” she said unsteadily, and pulled away enough to get his pants open. No underwear. 

“Whatever you want, beautiful,” he said, but despite the glibness of the words, there was no insincerity in his tone or expression. 

She needed to see him lose control, was the thing; he’d shredded her composure and it had been good but she hadn’t expected she would feel it so keenly as a power imbalance. She was naked, and he was fully dressed, and she needed— She yanked his shirt off, and he sat up to let her do it, wriggled out of his jeans, and was bared to her. She wrapped her hand around his dick and he made a strangled little noise. 

“Fuck,” she said, “I need—“

“Okay,” he said, and rolled her down to kiss her, caressing her almost reverently. “Do you have—“

“Yes,” she said, and pulled a strip of condoms out of the bedside drawer where she did not keep a pistol or knife, but did keep a large, workmanlike black silicone vibrating dildo that would actually be an incredibly effective cosh, should she need to render an intruder unconscious. Few intruders would have the gumption to use such a thing as an offensive weapon, and most would be distracted by finding such a thing when they had expected a pistol or knife.

Not that she didn’t use it more often for its manufacturer’s intended purpose, but that was another matter. 

He didn’t let her pin him down and ride him hard like she had half-planned, but he didn’t pin her down either. Instead he curled around her and pulled her sideways into his lap, rocking gently into her with his hand on her breasts and his mouth on her neck and it was sweet and gentle and she was so overstimulated it was probably about as much as she could handle. 

She’d never been made love to like that, was the thing— that was what it was, he was goddamn _wooing_ her, and it was fucking amazing, and she shuddered unexpectedly into another orgasm, all enfolded and filled and covered and cradled in his body. He was breathing her breath, tasting her pulse, and it was the most intimate goddamn thing anyone had ever done for her. 

“Bucky,” she moaned, shuddering, clawing at his thigh, his hip, God, she was still coming or maybe she was coming again, “Buh—“ it was ridiculous, it was a child’s name, it was not a name for an adult, it was not a name for a person she was fucking, “— _James_.”

“Na— ta— tasha,” he panted, composure finally slipping— not that he’d been calm and collected at any point during this, and that was probably the only saving grace, he wasn’t really holding himself together either, he was completely absorbed in her, intent on what he was doing to her. 

He was coming, and the desperate hitching drive of his body into hers set her off again and she cried out and dug her fingers into his thigh, clenching and shuddering and  gasping for breath. 

They moved together, slower, winding down to eventual throbbing stillness, and he sucked soft kisses against the side of her neck, not leaving marks, not leaving bruises. His motions were soft, almost reverent. 

“Natalia,” he murmured, and he was speaking Russian now, soft and fluid, “beautiful Natalia, powerful Natalia.” 

She turned her head and caught his mouth with hers, stilling him. “James,” she murmured, twining her fingers gently into his hair. A flash came to her, remembering how he’d fallen apart in her arms the last time, and she wrapped both her arms around his neck now, driven to tenderness by the memory. The balance of power between them was manageable, now, survivable. It was all right that he could undo her, because it was mutual. 

 

* * * 

 

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep in Natasha’s bed, but he woke suffused with warmth and contentment and really couldn’t bring himself to be sorry for it. She was still asleep, shallowly, vaguely aware of his motions but not open-eyed yet. He let himself nuzzle at her neck, burying his nose up under her hair for a moment before kissing under her ear and pulling away. 

He retrieved his jeans from the floor and pulled his phone out, realizing he’d been asleep a while, and sure enough there were two texts from Steve. He sighed. One said “Hey did you eat yet?” and had been sent two hours ago. The next had been sent one hour ago and said, “Where are you?” 

He replied “Sry I was hanging out with Natasha didn’t think to check phone” and sent it. Steve would make of that what he would. 

“Anything good?” Natasha asked sleepily. 

“Steve thinks I ran away, I think,” Bucky said. He yawned and rolled over, stretching. He felt so entirely human and like his old self, and for the first time he felt like maybe he could find a place here. Tony had offered him his own apartment and he hadn’t seen the point; they were still kicking the designs for his new arm back and forth and he couldn’t bring himself to venture more than a basic opinion. 

He was hopelessly in love with Natasha and that was what it was, he knew that, but he also knew he had a shitload of experience at living with that sort of confusing lopsided desperation, so he was prepared to deal with it only when it became a problem. Hopefully by then he’d have some other hobbies. 

Besides being hopelessly in love with Steve too. And having the most ridiculous crush on Sam. It was like his heart, so long disconnected from anything, was making up for decades of loneliness by just being one big sucking greedy pit of emotional attachments. He was in love with anyone who held still long enough. It was stupid, it was vulnerable, and it was also pretty okay, actually, all told, because the people who held still long enough all seemed to be pretty decent people. 

Whether there’d ever been anything between him and Steve— well, he’d have to man up and fucking ask somebody, because his memories settling out wasn’t ever going to be a completed process. He didn’t have to sort the memories out to know that he’d always been in love with Steve and had always wanted to sleep with him— whether Steve had ever wanted him back was the confusing part, and it sort of didn’t matter and sort of was the only thing that mattered.

Natasha ran her hand down the middle of his back, not shying away from the scar tissue mangling the left shoulder, but not drifting toward it either, and she sighed and snuggled in against his back. “You were really out,” she said. 

“Mm,” he said. “There’s a level of sleep you can only really attain in bed with someone who has just made you come your brains out. Repeatedly.”

She laughed, low and both sensual and genuinely amused. “That’s true,” she said. His phone buzzed. He rolled over into her grasp and lay next to her, his right arm behind her head and holding the phone so she could read the text from Steve. 

“You scared me. Natasha’s not answering her texts either. Did you eat?”

Natasha laughed. “I was really out too,” she said. “What the hell time is it?”

“It’s like 11am,” Bucky said. He stretched, enjoying the slide of his skin against hers where they were touching. He texted Steve back “I had a peanut butter sandwich at like 10pm,” and said to Natasha, “I could probably eat a small cow.”

She laughed again, and it was the most laughter he’d ever heard out of her, in this last little while. He surmised she was feeling pretty good about this too. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that she had probably never been allowed to have any kind of real relationship either. They would neither of them manage it but he felt reasonably confident that they had enough in common to fuck it up in approximately the same direction for long enough for it to be worthwhile. 

“I couldn’t eat a whole cow,” she said, “but I could probably eat all the meat parts.”

Bucky texted Steve, “Why, are you volunteering to cook?” 

“I don’t think Steve can cook,” Natasha said. Bucky shoved the phone under the pillow and rolled over onto her, taking her mouth with his and pulling her down into the bed. She laughed and wrapped her arms around his head and her legs around his waist. 

It was a little while, and another mutual orgasm, before he retrieved his phone from under the pillow, and Steve had texted three times. “No,” said the first one, “you don’t want that.” Then: “Sam points out there’s like three restaurants in this building, one of which does a phenomenal brunch.” And finally, “Should I ask why you keep abandoning your phone?”

“3 guesses,” Bucky texted back. “Hey,” he said aloud, sliding out of the bed and wandering down the hall. Natasha was in the bathroom, but had the door open, and stood in the doorway. “Sam points out that there are like three restaurants in this building,” he read.

“Oh,” she said. “Get in the shower with me and then we’ll pick one.”

Bucky texted Steve “Gimme like 20, let’s see what the eats are like in this place,” and put the phone on the sink. 

“Is it just a super soldier thing to have a refractory period like this?” Natasha asked, soapy skin sliding deliciously against him as her mouth curved with delight. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “I was always pretty good about it.” He thought about asking Natasha. Steve might have told her if any of those false memories he had were really… not false. 

“What?” she asked, looking rather too attentively at his face. 

He bit his lip. “Remember how I told you they implanted all kinds of false memories?” 

“Yes,” she said, playfulness vanishing and immediately replaced with seriousness. 

“I got a lot of those about… sex, before,” he said. “Like…” He fumbled, finding no words for it. 

“You seemed to recollect a lot of it pretty easily, when Steve rattled off your dating resumé,” Natasha pointed out, ducking her head backward into the shower spray to rinse shampoo. He couldn’t resist, but put his hand on her breast, and when she straightened, pulled her body against his to kiss her, enjoying the slick sensation of wet skin on wet skin.

“Mm,” he said. He was pretty turned-on by now, but this was the best chance he’d had for this conversation, so he kept enough of his mind on-track. It was easier not to let it cloud your mind when you’d had a couple of really mind-blowing orgasms in the last couple of hours. “I remember that stuff, but I don’t remember a lot of stuff around it.”

“Like what?” she asked, pushing him back against the tile wall carefully. He got her settled against himself, where he could get his hand down someplace useful and she could get her hand on him in return. 

“Guys,” he said. He knew there wasn’t the same stigma anymore, but if you were going to talk about being into unusual shit it helped to do it when the person whose opinion you cared about was really turned-on. Which she definitely was. 

Her eyes widened and she looked— well, she looked delighted, which was a promising start. “Well,” she said, “is that something you’re into now?”

“I know I was into it,” he said, “and yeah I still am, and I know I did some of that— you know, _before_. I just don’t… don’t remember— the important stuff, I don’t know if it…  was real.”

She made a little moaning noise— he had enough experience with specifically her by now to know exactly what she liked best, and he was giving it to her a little gently given how hard these parts of her had been working of late, but he was giving it to her all right— and tipped her head back. “Important stuff,” she said. But from her expression— which was flickering between blissed-out and intent on the conversation— she was following him. “Important stuff like who you did it with.”

“Exactly,” he said, and shivered a little— she knew what he liked too by now, and yeah, fuck, yeah. 

“You have to mean Steve,” she said, “there’s no one else it would still matter—“ At his anguished nod she actually moaned a little. “Oh my God, you and Steve.”

“I know,” Bucky said, “right?” and he was close. “Natasha—“ 

“Yeah,” she said, and bucked intently against him, shuddering— 

The really nice thing about shower sex, despite the tricky footing, was easy cleanup, and he washed his hair and rinsed off with his knees still a bit rubbery. 

“I can’t ask him something like that,” Bucky said, sitting on the toilet lid to towel his hair. 

She wasn’t saying anything, and he considered it a moment. He looked up from under the towel and she was standing on the bathmat, looking at him, and he knew. She saw the realization cross his face, and some tension went out of her shoulders. “Yeah,” she said. “He mentioned it.”

Relief washed over him in a great wave, and he put his hand over his face for a moment. “Christ,” he said, “I’ve been worrying about that for _months_.”

“He didn’t give me any details,” she said, then bit her lip. “Actually he might not have told me anything. He told Sam about it.”

He slung the towel around his shoulders and stood up. “Don’t need details,” he said. “It’s probably at least half fake memories but I can sort the rest out myself. Thank fucking God.”

It really was like a weight had been lifted from his chest, and he could breathe easier. There was just so goddamn much pressure not to fuck things up with Steve. He could ask for confirmation on specifics if he needed to, but at least the entire topic wasn’t closed-off anymore. 

He retrieved his phone and went into the bedroom to find his clothes. She came in a moment later and said “Wait, I have other clothes for you.”

“Why do you have clothes for me?” he asked, but then remembered that she’d bought him these jeans, it stood to reason she knew his size.

She went to a trunk against the wall and dug through it, pulling out folded garments and tossing them onto the bed. “I have all kinds of stuff. I do a lot of undercover stuff, and I have a habit of buying outfits for personas and while I’m at it, picking up outfits for a companion for that persona.”

“Really,” he said, sitting on the bed in his underwear. 

“I buy things in Steve’s size sometimes,” she said, “and you’re close enough. Actually I was hoping once you get yourself settled, maybe you could do some of these with me, because Steve is fucking terrible at being anyone but Captain America or Steve Rogers. Those are his two personas and that’s all you get.”

Bucky grinned, at that. “I have at least three personas,” he said. 

“You’re a natural,” she said, “and I am confident I could get you to become very, very good at this. Combined with how much I don’t dislike your company, and how very useful I know you are in a fight, you’d be perfect. If that’s something you want to do.”

“I definitely do,” he said, interested. It sounded like a good way he could be useful without just becoming another human weapon or tool to use. She’d mentioned off-handedy, elliptically, before, that she had projects she worked on, in atonement for her previous life, and he’d been distracted but had managed to convey that he’d be interested in that. She’d know. She understood. She’d know what it meant.

She smiled at him. “Good,” she said, and threw one last garment onto the bed. “Find something you like in that while I go fix my hair.”

One of the things was a nice button-down shirt, plain white and pretty damn similar to something he had owned. Nowadays the collars were weird and the cuffs fastened differently, but it was otherwise pretty similar. He found a plain white undershirt to go under it— one thing about modern fashions, people wore a lot fewer layers and the clothes were flimsier. That sounded like it would be sexy but mostly it meant everybody’s underwear was always semi-unintentionally showing and it looked sloppy as hell on almost everybody. 

He found a pair of decent trousers but they were just slightly tighter than he liked. Natasha walked in while he was still trying them on. “Steve’s got a smaller ass than I do,” he said, grimacing.

“Those don’t look bad,” she said, “but try this pair if you don’t like that fit.”

They were a little more sensible-looking. “That’s better,” he said. It was so long since he’d cared about his appearance more than whether he’d fit in acceptably or draw unwanted attention. 

“You clean up nice,” she said. 

He laughed, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “I need to figure out what to do with this,” he said. “And maybe shave. And you know, the hideous metal claw kinda ruins the line.” 

“Tony’s still waiting for you to approve a final design,” Natasha said. 

“I figure if I wait just a little bit longer there’ll be even less objection to making it a weapon,” Bucky said with a grin. 

“Tony said from the beginning it’d be upgradeable,” Natasha said. “If you don’t think he’s planned on that from day one, you’re wrong.”

He tilted his head; he hadn’t known that. “Well,” he said. 

She put on a dress that to his eye, unaccustomed to modern fashion though he was, looked semi-casual— it was blue and green with flowers on it, and draped appealingly across the bust with a simple bias-cut A-line skirt. She put in sparkly earrings and applied simple makeup, and Bucky texted Steve “I dunno where you wanna go but Natasha looks fucking fantastic so take that into account.”

Natasha even had shoes that fit him. They had soles like the boots he’d grown used to— modern shoes had chunky soft-rubber soles, great for traction but a little squishy if you weren’t used to them— but were low like oxfords, and nice suede. 

She fixed his collar for him, arranged his hair to her liking— he sort of felt it was beyond help, but she didn’t seem to think so— and he mentally squared his shoulders before they stepped out of the apartment. This was the new Bucky. Here goes nothing. 

 

* * *

 

There were three restaurants and a coffee shop on the tower’s vast first floor, which extended a long way along the street. It was the closest to outdoors Bucky had been in— well, the actual passage of time didn’t matter so much as the fact that it had pretty literally been another life. They went to the nicest one, and everyone knew who Steve was and everyone was completely cool with it. They were whisked off to a booth by a window away from other people, and only a couple of curious glances lingered on Bucky in the time it took them to get there. He did hear one murmur of his name. 

Steve was the only one who was staring at him who mattered. He’d told Bucky he looked really good about five times on the way down here. Bucky wasn’t sure if he liked the attention or not. _Those memories weren’t false_. 

_At least, some of them weren’t_ , he amended, a little sourly. 

He drank fifteen-dollar champagne mimosas, ate a shockingly expensive plate of Eggs Benedict with salmon and capers as though he were the sort of person who had ever spent twenty-five dollars on a plate of anything in his life—  let alone breakfast— pretended to take the restaurant’s shockingly casual opulence in stride. 

He’d always been good at faking that kind of thing, pretending he belonged in places he didn’t. Which was good, because it was his life now.

It was easier, now, because the thing was, he had nothing, literally actually nothing, and nobody was going to expect him to figure out how to get around that. He was legally dead, he knew that much— unlike Steve, who’d been MIA, he’d been declared KIA at his mother’s insistence (he couldn’t blame her; he’d’ve wanted the same), and the Army had paid out his death benefits, and his assets had all been redistributed and what-have-you. There was no back pay, no forgotten bank account, nothing waiting for him. And he wasn’t too proud to freeload off Steve for a little bit, but if he didn’t recover to the point that he could work with Natasha he had no idea what he was going to do. 

But these were all things to worry about for later. At the moment, he was on his second fifteen-dollar mimosa, and Natasha had her knee pressed against his under the table. And he was watching Steve flirt with Sam, and wondering if he was imagining it. 

The thing with Steve, if Bucky’s memory served correctly at all, was that he’d been happy enough to mess around with Bucky but had always been at least nominally more interested in dames. And Sam was perfect and beautiful and Bucky badly wanted to do filthy things with him— but he was definitely not a dame. And Steve had always been into dames. As far as Bucky could tell. 

He was almost positive he wasn’t remembering that wrong. 

But he was also almost positive he wasn’t reading Steve’s adorable little downward glances wrong. That was classic Rogers flirting. 

Well. It was a new century. But if Steve had always been into that, then it cast some of their past activities in a… different light. 

Either the confusion over that, or the Eggs Benedict, was giving Bucky a stomachache. He pushed the plate away slightly and sipped at his mimosa, grinning at Steve’s slightly-deliberately-awkward storytelling.

“I gotta say,” Sam said toward the end of the meal, “I didn’t expect you’d be doin’ this well this fast.”

Bucky gave him a cocky grin. “I don’t remember where I heard this bit of advice,” he said, “but the philosophy of ‘fake it til you make it’ has proven to be really useful in these kinds of situations.”

Steve considered him. “That’s an old-Bucky skill,” he said. 

“I know it is,” Bucky said. 

He excused himself while they were lingering over coffee, and wasn’t really that surprised to discover that the restroom was as bizarrely luxurious as the rest of the place— all black-flecked marble, shiny, low lighting, flowers and candles and frills like that. He watched the man in the mirror in his peripheral vision as he washed up at the sink, watched the man nerve himself up to speak. 

“Excuse me,” the man said. “Are you— who I think you are?”

Bucky turned the water off and dried his hand on the paper towel before he answered. “Depends who you think I am,” he said, turning to look at him. The man was young, almost painfully fashionable, white, probably rich. Well, if he was here, he’d have to be. 

“I’m, I’ve watched all your videos,” the man said. “I, your story. It’s so fascinating.” 

Bucky tilted his head. He was a little tired of the nonchalantly charming act, so he wasn’t bothering not to give this kid Assassin Face. That’s what you got for coming up behind a guy in an unfamiliar room. He wasn’t going to freak out— he _wasn’t_ — but he wasn’t going to kill himself summoning up pleasant politeness either. “I don’t think that’s the word I’d use,” he said. 

Another man came out of one of the stalls, and passed behind Bucky to wash his hands, just as a third man came into the room. “I don’t mean to belittle what you’ve gone through, Mr. Barnes,” the first man said, babbling a little. “Of course— it’s just— you know, it’s inspiring.”

Too many strangers. Too many people. The man behind him was taking too long washing his hands. Bucky turned, trying in vain to get his back to a wall without obviously freaking out— 

 and the first man came at him, on his left side, if he’d had a decent arm he’d’ve killed him but as it was, it wasn’t enough to keep the needle out of his deltoid muscle. 

Paralytic. Paralytic. How had they known, the chemical and the dose? Had they been waiting this whole time? Bucky’s sole attempt at a yell slurred down into silence as he lost control of his vocal chords and slumped down. 

They wrapped him in someone’s coat and carried his unresponsive body somewhere, and after a few moments of jostling, the sharp stab of another needle hit his right shoulder and another chemical spun his blacked-out vision around. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey. Sorry about the last-page plot twist, it surprised me too. And I don't know how it ends either, I'm stuck. (OK, I know how it ends. I just don't know how to get there.) But! I promise it'll be both worse and better than you're thinking. I'm confident it will be an unforeseen outcome because uh, I don't know either. I'm working on it. People's responses, here and on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bomberqueen17), help enormously even though I'm still really bad at responding-- new meds mean I'm more energetic but still inexplicably mute sometimes. It means the world to me. And also helps me get through the logistics-block (I'm never writers-blocked, I can always write, I just can't always work out the complicated bits) a lot, so hint hint. <3
> 
> More seriously, I've always had at least a chapter on deck, and often one in the hole, when I've been posting this, but the block on the next one means I don't anymore, and this one is sparser than I intended. So uh. Anyone who has offered beta, I now have to get off my ass and figure out how to take you up on it. :) How do people do that now? Gdocs? What? I don't know. I'm an old LJ refugee.


	10. The Adventures of Pipsqueak and Meathead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bucky says the phrase "No, you fuckin' don't" with increasing frustration an astonishing number of times. His anaconda really don't.

“Well, well, Sergeant Barnes,” a familiar sibilantly-accented voice said. “Here we are once again, with you at my mercy. It is truly astonishing, is it not, that I can continue to learn so much from you?”

His veins were still full of the paralyzing drug, and it was just like the nightmare he’d had the other night, that had given him the seizure. But he knew this was no nightmare. This was real. It hurt too much not to be.

“I know you thought you were free of me,” Zola went on, smug, “but you thought wrong, my dear. I have always been with you, and soon I will be able to take up my rightful place.”

He couldn’t move, he couldn’t struggle, he couldn’t see. They still had his eyes covered. Sounds were muffled; he was indoors, somewhere, and someone was moving around distantly, but there was no one nearby, and he was cold. He wasn’t dressed for this. He had no weapons, and his arm was pretty much just an articulated metal stick he had only coarse control over at best. 

The worst thing he realized then was that Zola’s voice was not muffled. It was not coming from outside the hood tied over his head. 

It was coming from inside his head. 

“I see you are catching on to your situation, Sergeant Barnes,” Zola said smugly. “You are beginning to realize what you are up against.”

 _Not really_ , Bucky thought a little despairingly; he really didn’t understand at all. If Zola was in his head, then who the hell had him tied up? Did these goons know? Was that part of it? 

“You should spare yourself so much worry, Sergeant,” Zola said. “You know that you were never the tactician. Others have always done that sort of thinking for you, and it is better that way. Now, of course, I can do it from inside of you, so you will not be so reliant on others. I just need a few more components to solidify my control of you.”

 _The old doctor always did love to monologue_ , Bucky thought, realizing Zola could hear it. _Tell me more about these components, and maybe I can come up with a more pointed way of telling you to go fuck yourself._

“Oh,” Zola said, sounding amused, “such spirit. I had missed that, Sergeant; it is a long time ago that we wiped all of that out of you. It will have to be destroyed again, more’s the pity, but it cheers me to know you seem to have such an infinite supply of it.”

During the nightmare, Bucky had been too terrified to do anything but lie there in mindless despair. Now, faced with actual physical danger, he was just angry. _Seriously_ , he thought, _put a fucking sock in it_ , and tried to get a better sense of his surroundings. 

He remembered brunch now, remembered the mimosas and the eggs benedict and all that, and remembered Natasha— oh, yes, he remembered Natasha, and he luxuriated a moment in remembering her gorgeous, gorgeous body, the way the water had run over her skin in the shower, the way she’d looked at him, the way her mouth had tasted. Zola’s ephemeral presence made a kind of insubstantial, shocked noise, and for a split-second Bucky was horrified to think that Zola could see those very private memories, but then it gave way to a sort of black amusement. 

 _You never saw a real woman like that in your entire life_ , Bucky thought, with grim satisfaction. _You lived and died without ever touching anything that beautiful_. 

“Some of us have better things to do,” Zola sniffed. 

 _Yeah, that’s the kind of shit bitter lonely people say, now isn’t it,_ Bucky thought. _Maybe you can take that memory away from me just like all the others, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s something I’ve had that you never did._

“Oh?” Zola’s voice curled coyly. “What of all the perversions in which you used to indulge with your darling Captain Rogers?”

 _It’s called being bisexual_ , Bucky thought boredly, _and it’s not even a thing people freak out about nowadays, and if you hadn’t gotten me fucking abducted I was actually thinking of trying to get him into a threesome with Natasha, which is another thing you’ll never have so you should maybe get the fuck out of my head and go cry about that_.

“You are a disgusting abhorrent creature,” Zola hissed. 

 _The feeling’s mutual,_ Bucky answered. _So shut the fuck up, and when I figure out where you are I’m going to get Tony Stark to burn you out with a fucking soldering iron_.

“He would have to kill you to do it,” Zola said smugly, and too quickly, and Bucky laughed inwardly. 

 _I doubt that_ , he answered. Zola had been a genius, sure, but Stark was better. _I thought you were thousands of feet of magnetic tape. Did you get an upgrade?_

“There are backups of me everywhere,” Zola said, “and nowadays you don’t need, excuse me, hundreds of thousands of feet of magnetic tape. You can use microchips.”

 _You mean to tell me you’re on a microSD card_ , Bucky thought. _Like the one in my fucking phone_.

“Nothing so mundane as that,” Zola said. 

 _Oh_ , Bucky thought, _you’re plenty fucking mundane. That’s the hell of it, isn’t it? I’ve seen so much evil in this world, and so much of it is just so goddamn banal. I’ve got my memories now, Zola, I’m not mindlessly terrified of you, I remember everything you did to me and I can look at it with some perspective and realize what a pathetic piece of work you really were._

“You can’t hope to comprehend my genius,” Zola said loftily. 

 _I’m not interested in trying_ , Bucky answered. _Seriously, shut the fuck up_. He focused on thinking of his surroundings, and when Zola tried to speak again, he drowned him out by running obsessively through the lyrics to Anaconda, which he’d watched probably forty times on repeat on YouTube when it first came out because damn. 

He had been familiar with the works of Josephine Baker in his youth, and had had the exquisite pleasure of attending one of her performances with Steve, which had been hilarious because of how much it had scandalized Steve, but also had been incandescently hot. Obviously her spirit was alive in the performers of today, and the advantage of video was that you could repeat it on demand.

_Now that bang bang bang,_  
 _I let him hit it 'cause he slang cocaine_  
 _He toss my salad like his name Romaine_  
 _And when we done, I make him buy me Balmain  
_ _I'm on some dumb shit_

He got into it enough to try wiggling his fingers on-beat. (Balmain: he’d looked it up. Expensive designer shit. He was poorer in this century than he’d been in the last, so it was irrelevant to his lifestyle, but at least he knew what it was thanks to the Internet.) It wasn’t successful but it was diverting. Eventually Zola gave up in disgust— he had not been familiar with Josephine Baker and had no interest in becoming so with her or her spiritual descendants, confirming Bucky’s suspicion that the man had never been human in the first place— and Bucky got down to the business of analyzing the space he was trapped in. 

It was an indoor space, with passive ventilation; it smelled a bit musty, like a basement. The floor was painted concrete, gritty and very cold and slightly damp. It wasn’t a big space, but it was larger than a room in a house. Probably ten by ten yards or so. Some sort of machinery somewhere in the room kicked on, ran briefly, and turned off— a heater or boiler or something. Gas-fired.

The distant sounds of movement were coming from above him. About then was when he put it together: he was in the basement of a residential house. And his swallowing reflex was starting to come under his conscious control, which meant that with real effort he could probably start to move under his own volition in about ten minutes or so. 

He’d counted down to seven minutes and had started to get control of his fingers back when a door opened and two people came down the basement stairs. He stopped moving and mentally steeled himself. 

“Good,” a voice said, male, American East Coast accent, “he hasn’t moved.”

“We have a couple minutes left with that dosage,” another voice answered, also male, probably Southern American accent. “Time enough to do what we have to.”

Bucky schooled himself to complete limpness, no hint of resistance even as they approached. Six minutes. He could control his eyelids and was starting to have control over his tongue, and his fingers could move but not independently of one another. He hadn’t tried the prosthetic; even when he was fine he didn’t have a lot of control.

A hand grabbed the front of his shirt and dragged him up, then pulled the hood off over his head. He blinked by reflex, but his discipline was good enough that he didn’t move the facial features he was starting to have conscious control over. 

It was dim in the room, and cold, and the two men were both white, one skinny and dark-haired and the other bigger, of medium coloring. The big one transferred his grip to the back of Bucky’s shirt, holding him in an approximate sitting position, and the other one turned on a light. 

It took effort not to squint; Bucky lowered his eyelids but kept his face slack. “Is he awake?” the big one asked. 

“He’s most likely conscious,” the smaller one answered, reaching out and touching Bucky’s jaw, slapping lightly at his cheek. Bucky wanted to turn his head and bite the man’s finger off, but it would be better not to react. 

“How long until he’s dangerous?” the big one asked. 

The small one crouched back on his heels and pulled a smartphone out of his jacket pocket. “Ah,” he said, “ten minutes.” He had a timer app running. Stupid. 

“It’s a shame he didn’t have his phone on him,” the big one said. “We coulda got a lot farther if we’d had it.”

“Yeah,” the small one said, “well. He can hear, you know.” He looked into Bucky’s face, taking his jaw between his fingers to turn Bucky’s head. Bucky made it look like more of an effort to focus his eyes than it was. “Look at you. Got your Bucky Barnes haircut, you almost look like a regular human. You figurin’ on re-integrating yourself into society, honey?”

Bucky fixed him with a glare. Maybe the guy would monologue at him so he could figure out who these people were and what they wanted. Maybe, though, he wasn’t fucking interested.

“We should get him tied up before he starts getting control back,” the big guy said, sounding gratifyingly nervous. 

“Yeah, yeah, we got time,” the smaller guy said. But he stood up pretty promptly, and helped drag Bucky more or less upright. They hauled him into a chair and busied themselves tying him down. Bucky considered resisting, but it would still be more or less token at this point, and also, he noticed they were handcuffing his prosthetic arm as though it were a real one, as though it weren’t something he could detach, and that meant they were fucking stupid. So he didn’t bother trying anything. 

The restraints, he noted, were nylon straps. He wouldn’t be able to tear them, but he could probably rip the chair apart. It was just steel tubing with a plastic seat. That would be sufficient; they had tied his legs to the chair but not to each other. 

These guys had absolutely no idea what he was capable of.

“Well,” the smaller one said, stepping back and pulling his phone out again. “Smile for the camera, sunshine, we’ve got a nice bidding war going on over you.”

There was clue number one. So they had captured him more on general speculation than from any true motive of their own. Just as well; anyone truly motivated would have just killed him from a distance. Which was really the only safe way to handle the Winter Soldier. 

At least there wasn’t a cryo tank here. That was one thing Bucky couldn’t face. Pretty much anything else, he could handle. As long as he didn’t lose years. 

As long as he didn’t have to defrost. He would rather die than face that. 

“First thing we did was make it look like you broke out on your own,” the small guy said, putting his phone away. “So your friends think you abandoned them, now. They’ll be hunting for you, thinking you ran away the first chance you got. Whoever winds up buying you, one thing’s definitely true: your friends will never know what really happened to you.”

 _Zola_ , Bucky thought, _you got some real amateurs working for you._ Natasha wasn’t stupid. She knew how unprepared he was to flee. There was nothing these assholes could stage that would be remotely convincing to her, and even less so for Steve who was pretty determined to believe the best of Bucky. 

“They are not working for me,” Zola said, amused. “I knew no more of this plan than you did. But I know I will come out on top regardless.”

_What if they kill me? You gonna reanimate me?_

“I will have complete control of your physical body soon enough,” Zola said. “And I know they will not kill you, you are too valuable.”

Bucky didn’t like the sound of that. He watched his two captors for a moment. An alarm went off on the smaller one’s phone, and it took him a moment to get it switched off, then the two of them looked expectantly at Bucky. Must have been the timer for the dose of paralyzing agent, Bucky theorized. What, like they thought it’d wear off all at once? He could probably move his legs now, but there was no point letting on. They’d tied his legs to the chair anyway. He wiggled his fingers, knowing they couldn’t see because they weren’t fucking looking.

“So,” the smaller one said, addressing Bucky directly. He was probably the brains of the operation. There had to be more of them than just two, though. He was fussing with his phone, still— either messing with the timer, or maybe sending the picture he’d taken or something. “Winter Soldier. Can I call you Bucky?” 

Bucky gave him a look. His head was propped against the back of the chair, and he didn’t deign to raise it. 

“I suppose you expect us to explain ourselves,” the guy said, with a glimmer of smugness. 

“Not really,” Bucky said, slurring his words more than he strictly had to. 

The big guy laughed unexpectedly at the expression of surprise that crossed the smaller guy’s face. “He got you, there,” the big guy said. 

“Fair,” the smaller guy said. “I hadn’t expected you to be a wise guy.”

“You know I been tied to a lotta chairs in my life,” Bucky said. “I’m just gonna kill you when I get a chance, which is what I’ve always done. I’m not particularly concerned about your motivations.”

“Don’t you want to know who’s bidding on you?” the smaller guy asked. 

Bucky shook his head slightly. “No,” he said, “I don’t much care. Get a good price, though. Even without the arm I gotta be worth a pretty penny. I still got all this sleeper programming, y’know? There’s an AI in my head trying to take over, charge extra for him.”

“Don’t tell them about me,” Zola hissed, “you idiot! I could be an advantage.”

 _Like I’m going to cooperate with you in any way at all,_ Bucky thought back at him. _I’d rather they killed me than you succeeded in taking over. C’mon, you of all people have the perspective to understand my priorities._

“An AI, huh?” the smaller guy said, looking uneasy. 

“He’s apparently on a microchip,” Bucky said, “or so he tells me. He’s plannin’ on takin’ over.” He looked from one of them to the other, taking in their expressions. “You don’t really know anything about me,” he realized. “You got no clearance. You don’t know what augmentations I have or anything about my programming.” He shook his head, incredulous. “You’re not even HYDRA. Holy shit. You’re gonna get us all killed.”

“I know enough about you,” the smaller guy said, slightly unsettled. 

“If you think you know my control words you’re wrong,” Bucky said. They both looked blank. “Oh sweet Jesus Christ, you don’t even know _about_ the control words. This is a problem. Listen, you knuckleheads, I was in protective custody not to protect _myself_ but to protect dumb assholes like _you_.”

“We know what you are,” the smaller guy said, annoyed. “We know what you can do.”

“I can tell from here,” Bucky said, “you fuckin’ _don’t_.”

“We’re HYDRA,” the smaller guy said defensively. 

“Save me from amateurs and wannabes,” Bucky said, exasperated. “I’m fuckin’ serious, you give me a phone right now and let me call Captain America to come save you from yourselves. You got no business fuckin’ with shit you don’t understand.”

“Good try,” the smaller guy said, smirking. “Like we’d let you go that easily.”

Bucky shook his head slowly. “I’m not messin’ around,” he said. “If this is some kind of joke it’s not a very good one. You clearly haven’t read my fuckin’ file. And maybe I’m tryin’ to turn over a new leaf and not do so much murderin’ but I’m _not_ the only occupant of this body and it may not be anything I have any say in.”

“We’re not idiots,” the smaller guy said. The bigger one, Bucky noted, was definitely not the planner here. He was looking pretty uneasy. “We have it all worked out.”

“I been conscious for like five minutes, Pipsqueak,” Bucky said, “and I don’t even know what’s upstairs, but I can tell from here, you fuckin’ don’t. You don’t have _shit_ worked out. It wasn’t just the fuckin’ arm that was augmented, and I got all kinds of shit in my head that not even I know about, let alone anybody else. They used to keep dartguns trained on me with remote-controlled triggers because I routinely killed my guards with their own guns while I was restrained.” 

“Why are you telling them all this?” Zola demanded peevishly. “You are an idiot.”

 _Because they’re fucking children_ , Bucky answered. _Look at them. They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. And I don’t want to be locked in this basement with you_.

“We have adequate security measures,” Pipsqueak said, and the bigger guy’s face clearly said they did not. 

Bucky looked at the big guy, raised both eyebrows, and looked back at Pipsqueak. “No,” he said, loud and slow, “you fuckin’ don’t. Look, kid, untie me, gimme my shoes back, drive me to the bus station and buy me a ticket to New York and a nickel for the phone when I get there. I won’t tell anybody who you are, I won’t come after you or send anybody after you, and we’ll just forget this whole thing ever happened.” He tilted his head; the bigger guy was thinking about it. “It’s no skin off my nose. Nobody’s really been hurt yet. No harm, no foul.” 

“You must think I’m really stupid,” Pipsqueak said, bristling.

“No,” Bucky said, “I _know_ you’re stupid. You think just because you know the dose of paralyzing agent to keep me from moving, you got a handle on me? Did you even look up what kind of restraints to use? Do you know what kind of action triggers they built into my programming? Do you know where my tracking devices are? The only reason I’m still fuckin’ sittin’ here is because I’m so goddamn sick of killin’ people I don’t wanna hurt you. Otherwise you would already be dead and I’d be out that door.”

The paralytic had worn off, and he knew if he just stood up he’d bust the chair apart. It’d probably yank his bad arm out of the socket, though, and he really didn’t want to. The men both had guns and he’d have to hurt them to keep them from shooting him. And they were idiots, maybe, but the fact that they were amateurs made him a lot more sympathetic. They hadn’t been involved in this, they didn’t realize what they were getting into.

“You need to shut up,” Pipsqueak said angrily.

“Tell me this isn’t a residential neighborhood,” Bucky said, eyeing the stairs. It was definitely a house, probably suburban. “Tell me there aren’t, like, kids playing in the next driveway over. Because if I go off I’m goin’ all the way off.”

“You’re not going to blow up the neighborhood with your mind,” Pipsqueak said. 

“This house is heated with gas,” Bucky said, “and the hot water heater is right fuckin’ there. It would take me approximately no effort to convert this house into a bomb. And don’t lie and say you thought of that, because the water heater kicked on a moment ago, the gas is definitely connected right now.”

Pipsqueak shifted his weight slightly, and Bucky said, “I am perfectly aware that you’re planning to drug me again so you might as well take your time and aim properly, if I were going to evade the needle I already would have.”

“You’re tied to a chair,” the bigger guy said, frowning. 

“It’s never stopped me before,” Bucky said. “I’m serious, roll the sleeve up or something.”

“This is really not how I thought this would go,” the bigger guy said. 

“I rarely do what’s expected,” Bucky said, “which is why I’m still alive and a whole fuckload of other people aren’t. Listen, if you’re trying to sell me to anybody who knows what I am, they’re going to figure out what fuckin’ amateurs you are as quick as I just did, and they’re not gonna bother to pay you, they’re just gonna kill you and fuckin’ take me. I’d rather that didn’t happen. You’d rather that didn’t happen. Let’s talk this over.”

The bigger guy looked at the smaller guy. Pipsqueak made a really pissy face and jabbed the needle into Bucky’s arm through the shirt. “Dick,” Bucky spat, before his body went limp. 

 

* * *

 

“No phone,” Steve said, rubbing his face and staring up from where his head rested on the back of the couch, “no knives, no weapons at all, no nothing.”

“Clean socks and underwear,” Natasha said. 

“What,” Steve said, managing a flash of humor through his exhaustion, “did you dress him?”

Natasha didn’t answer for a moment, and he raised his head to look at her. “Oh,” he said. She had. 

“Every article of clothing he has, you or I bought him,” she said, a little prickly. “He chose that outfit out of a whole pile of clothes I’d picked up for him. It’s not like he was wearing _my_ underwear.”

Unbidden the far-too-vivid image of Bucky in a pair of lacy, modern women’s panties like Steve had seen in Natasha’s laundry hamper sprang into his mind. (He’d seen her in her underwear, but on missions, and she wore fairly plain briefs then.) Natasha’s sudden laugh told Steve he hadn’t managed to entirely control his reaction, and his cheeks went hot. 

“Surely they wouldn’t fit,” Steve said, trying to muster some dignity at least. 

“But he’d look hot, wouldn’t he,” Natasha said. 

Steve covered his face with both hands. “I’m not— I’m not thinking about that.”

“You so were,” she said, amusement curling warm through her voice. “He’d look so good. You know they make lingerie like that for men now. I bet I could find something in his size.”

“Natasha,” Steve said, trying to sound stern but definitely coming across strangled instead. 

“I could get you some,” she said. “Blue’s definitely your color, like a real rich royal blue. Silk and ribbons. For Bucky, though, I’d go with something more like turquoise, and lace.”

Steve had never in his life even considered wearing frilly underpants. “I don’t,” he tried, but gave up. God, she was right, of course, and that was— “You need to not do that to me.”

She laughed, covering her face with her hands, and then made a little distressed noise. “We’ll find him,” she said. “God. We’ll fucking find him.”

“We will,” Steve said, and he suspected it might be calculated vulnerability on her part, but it had effectively put him into the role of comforting her, which was a healthier place for him to be. He collected himself and sat up. They had just a few minutes of downtime while information compiled, a team of analysts running through security footage and network chatter and the like to save them from running off on wild goose chases like they had been all day. 

“You and he,” Steve said a little awkwardly, as the thought processed, “um.” He waved a hand. “Is that a— a thing?”

He’d never actually really been aware of Natasha having boyfriends before, was the thing. He knew she and Clint had an on-again off-again kind of thing but it was never particularly formal. He didn’t know if Bucky would do something like that or not.

She sighed. “Kind of,” she said. “It’s— I’m pretty messed-up about that stuff.” She looked over, sort of indirectly, and it wasn’t anything he’d ever expected from her. He didn’t know what he had expected, though. She wasn’t the flowers-and-chocolates kind of girl with rules about number of dates, but he’d never subscribed to the somewhat absent-minded view most people seemed to have of her as a femme fatale-type heart-eating-bitch either. “So is he, is the thing. Both of us— we talked about it a little, and he has… they gave us false memories, Steve. Mine are pretty straightforward, I’m decent at sorting them out. And he’s doing all right at his, but his problem is that a lot of them are tangled up with stuff that happened for real.”

“That sounds awful,” Steve said. He knew Bucky was still missing chunks of time here and there, had gaps and lost pieces and garbled sections. He couldn’t imagine what that would be like, but then to make it worse by putting in unreliable sections that were plausible? 

“A lot of them were about sex,” Natasha said. “Which is stupid, because that was never really what his missions were about. It’s extra-infuriating, because that was just his handlers amusing themselves to break him down. They could have done anything and they chose to give him that kind of shit.”

“I see,” Steve said, feeling a little sick. He was kind of used to it now though. 

“He told me,” Natasha said, sitting forward and pulling her knees up to her chest, and her voice had dropped a little even though they were alone in Steve’s living room. She hesitated, fiddling with one of her gauntlets. “That he…” Steve gave her an attentive look, and she met his eyes, then looked down. “He remembered doing… things… with you, and he didn’t know if that was real or not.”

“Oh,” Steve said, sharply. 

“I told him,” Natasha said, and he realized she was… perhaps embarrassed? Steve considered that for about half a second before realizing what the issue was. He’d never told her. If she knew, it was because she’d eavesdropped or ask behind his back. “I mean, I don’t know— much, just—“

“What exactly did you tell him?” Steve asked, gritting his teeth in worry. If she’d given him the wrong idea— but Steve wasn’t even sure what the wrong idea would be, because he didn’t know what the right idea was. They’d never put words to any of it. 

She looked at him, with the air of making herself do it. “He said he— he knew he really— it was really true that he’d done stuff with guys, but he couldn’t remember for sure if— with whom, and I said how could it matter unless it was Steve, and he said exactly, and I knew, Sam and I had speculated and I know it’s true that you and Bucky had— a bit, in the past.” 

“Sam told you?” Steve asked. It didn’t sound like the sort of thing Sam would do. He closed his eyes. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.” Who knew how long she’d spent in his air vents? Or wherever she’d eavesdropped. She read his texts sometimes, he was sure. Hell, it wasn’t top secret; it didn’t even matter at this point, wasn’t illegal, wouldn’t get anybody in trouble, wouldn’t hurt anyone’s reputation. Whatever.

“I don’t know any details, said I didn’t, and he said he didn’t care, he could sort the rest out on his own. He just—“ She hesitated. “He was really relieved, I think. Just, that there was some truth in it, at least. That’s all.”

Steve considered for a long moment. He knew how unreliable emotion could be, how it could betray you, and how fraught his feelings about Bucky already were. If he threw in unreliable memories as well… “I’m glad you knew, then,” Steve said. “I’m glad you could answer that for him. I’d hate to think of him worrying about it.”

Natasha was staring at him, and as he returned her gaze her mouth softened, then turned up at the corners. “You have a right to be mad at me,” she said, “for prying into your personal life like that.” 

“But I can’t be,” Steve said, somewhat resignedly. “Natasha, I have no reasonable expectations of privacy around you, and it bothers me sometimes but it’s saved my ass enough that I can’t really be angry.”

She grinned at him. “I feel vindicated.”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t like it,” he said. “But as long as you use your powers for good I can’t really object without being a bit of a hypocrite.” She was watching him, considering, and on impulse he added, “It’s kind of the pain in the ass side effect of having a family.”

“Family,” Natasha said, eyes widening slightly. 

“It’s as close as I come,” Steve said. And it was true; Bucky’s mom had been nosy and prying as hell, and he’d often been annoyed by it, but when it came to a crisis she’d always come through. She hadn’t been as creepy as Natasha but she hadn’t been as good at it as Natasha, either.

Natasha stared at him, expressionless, and he knew he’d really shocked her if she was making that absence-of-expression face. “Me too,” she said finally. 

The door chimed, and Steve said, “It’s unlocked,” and Lakeisha came in then, looking tight-faced and grim.

“You have to see this,” she said, and she was holding up a tablet, and the screen was showing a freeze-frame of a video that was Bucky tied to a chair. 

 

* * * 

 

They kept forgetting that being paralyzed didn’t mean Bucky was unconscious, so they had a lot of conversations within his earshot, but at least they weren’t stupid enough to leave him unattended. There was another person coming who was in on the plot and had been meeting with potential buyers and was more of a ringleader. Bucky was tempted to bust his way out of here before the newcomer arrived, but his limbs weren’t cooperating yet. 

“If this other person has better access to your file,” Zola purred, “he may know which drugs to give you to suppress your consciousness and let mine take over.”

Bucky ignored him rather than attempting to figure out if that was a bluff or a genuine observation. It didn’t bear thinking about. Instead he focused, as well as he could, on the memories he’d been considering of Steve, the ones he’d been sorting through to try and find out which were real and which were false. He hadn’t had a chance to really concentrate since Natasha’s revelation that some of them were true after all. 

The fact that Zola was obviously completely disgusted by it was an enormous bonus. 

 

* * * 

 

_France, 1945_

“Bucky,” Steve was saying. “Bucky. Bucky!”

“Three t-t-two five—“ Bucky came to himself in the middle of the number, and blinked. Steve’s face was right next to his, and there was a weight across his body that it took him a moment to recognize as Steve’s enormous new body, pinning him down. “Steve? What—“

“You were dreaming,” Steve said, his voice a soft familiar breath warm against Bucky’s neck. And it was the bulk of his shoulders that reminded Bucky where they were, in a barn in France, someone’s hayloft, he’d been on the first watch and when Dugan relieved him he’d sent him up here to bunk with Steve. 

“Sorry,” Bucky said, realizing he was all wound-up, pushing up against Steve, one hand fisted tight in his shirt. They were tangled together in their combined bedrolls, and the back of Bucky’s shirt was soaked in sweat. He let his breath out, let his body go limp, untangled his fingers from Steve’s shirt. 

“No, no,” Steve said, “it’s okay. Bucky. You’re okay. What were you dreaming about?”

“I don’t remember,” Bucky said honestly; he rarely remembered the nightmares he had all the time now, and he didn’t need to. He knew fine well what they were about, and it was nothing Steve needed to know. But the line between waking and sleep was like a heavy door shutting, and when he was on one side he didn’t know what was on the other at all. A lot of things were like that now; when he was one thing, he didn’t know how to be the other, and it would be great if he could control it but he couldn’t always, and sometimes the door shut behind him when he left being Bucky and became Sergeant Barnes, and sometimes he couldn’t get that door back open. 

But it was great, when he was on the other side of it, because Bucky could push the door shut and not see any of the people Sergeant Barnes had killed, or had gotten killed. The only issue was that Steve didn’t understand about the doors, and seemed to be able to switch mindsets a lot faster and with more control and less of a boundary. He hadn’t been in the shit as long, but now he was super-powered and magical and all, so it was probably going to always be like that. 

“It’s okay,” Steve said, and he was petting Bucky’s hair like they were kids. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. His heart was still pounding; whatever he’d been dreaming about had been a doozy. Well, it usually was. “I didn’t yell, did I?”

“You never do,” Steve said. 

“Good,” Bucky said, and pressed his face into Steve’s neck. He’d missed him, and having him back had opened up the doors of a lot of little rooms he’d mostly forgotten about. But Steve’s body was so different— everything about it was different, but jarringly familiar in strange little body-language details. Steve still had the same nervous gestures, but everything from his hands to his heartbeat was different. 

He smelled almost the same, though, and Bucky closed his eyes and breathed, curling his fingers back into Steve’s shirt; his body was still the same warm thing, even if it took up far more of Bucky’s armspan than it had used to. 

“You’re okay,” Steve said. “It’s my turn to protect you.”

“I don’t need you to protect me,” Bucky told Steve’s shoulder. “Just don’t let me get lost. That’s all I want.”

“I’ll be right here,” Steve said, and he was still lying on Bucky, still had his hand wrapped around Bucky’s ribs to pin him down, his hip over Bucky’s pelvis and his leg hooked over Bucky’s. 

It reminded Bucky of something— something long ago, another lifetime ago, behind another door he’d shut and rarely opened now. He shifted experimentally, flexing his spine a little, pulling one foot up a little to settle his hips, to make a more inviting cradle. And sure enough, Steve twitched and moved against him, breath catching almost-imperceptibly. 

“Steve,” Bucky whispered, letting his breath wash over the junction of Steve’s neck and shoulder, down the collar of his shirt. 

Steve caught his breath more obviously. “Buck,” he answered, turning his head to look into Bucky’s face. Bucky looked him in the eye, then dropped his gaze to Steve’s mouth, that impossible lower lip. He hadn’t— not since before he’d shipped out, they hadn’t— 

Steve lowered his head and took Bucky’s mouth, sliding his tongue in with an unexpectedly sweet and gentle hunger. Bucky made a fervent little noise, taken aback by the intensity of his own response— he needed this, it was beyond seeking comfort and into absolute necessity. 

“Help me,” he whispered, wrapping one shaking hand around the back of Steve’s neck. 

Steve kissed him again, and murmured, “I got you.”

 

* * * 

_Undisclosed Location, 2014_

He knew there was someone watching him, but he didn’t bother trying to turn his head now that his paralysis had faded. The door at the top of the stairs swung open, shattering his reverie, but he didn’t react. This was probably it, was probably the newcomer. Hopefully he didn’t have potential buyers with him.

Because the thing was, Bucky could bust out of here. The chair was far too fragile to hold him, and what’s more, this prosthetic arm was at least nominally removable and yet they had handcuffed it like a real arm. He’d probably hurt himself slightly getting free, but it would be relatively trivial to escape. But he’d most likely have to kill his captors to do it; he wasn’t well-trained in non-lethal fighting techniques, and drugged and desperate as he was he couldn’t risk failing to incapacitate them, so he’d have to kill them. And he didn’t want to do that. He kept reminding himself of it: he didn’t want to do that. 

Steve would find him; he had every bit of faith that he would, and moreover, that he could. Between Stark and Natasha, there was no way they wouldn’t track him down, and as long as Steve knew he was alive to look for, there was no way he wouldn’t come for him. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t think Steve would kill his captors. But if Steve did, it would be justified. If Bucky did, it would be further proof of his unredeemable nature. There would be nothing controversial in it. 

It was, moreover, a return on Bucky’s lifelong investment in keeping Steve’s hands clean. Because Steve had never killed anyone who didn’t need killing, that thereby meant that if he killed someone, it was because they needed it. It was circular, but no less compelling for it. 

At any rate, here Bucky sat, with Zola buzzing in the back of his head, almost palpable, and heavy footsteps descending the stairs. 

A switch clunked, and a bright light came on straight in Bucky’s face. “Well, shit,” an unfamiliar voice said, “it really is him. Wouldja lookit that.”

Bucky squinted, managing to get a peek under his eyebrows at the new guy. He was biggish, indistinct in the shadows but from the silhouette of him, kind of fat. He was standing next to the smaller guy who’d done most of the talking earlier, Pipsqueak. The bigger guy from before, the unsure one, he was out of sight, and had probably been down here the whole time.

Oh, they had a camera, in Pipsqueak’s hand, pointed at him. Fantastic. “I’m fuckin’ serious,” Bucky said, “you let me go, I walk outta here, nobody dies, that is your best possible outcome.”

“Oh, you’ve discussed this before?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “with Pipsqueak and Meathead, before you showed up, Chubby.”

“Pipsqueak and—“ Chubby cut himself off. “He’s a comedian.”

“Pipsqueak did most of the talkin’,” Bucky said. “I assume you’re all related and your last name is hyphenated. Fuckin-Amateurs. Pipsqueak, Meathead, and Chubby Fuckin-Amateurs.” 

“He is absolutely a comedian,” Chubby said, shaking his head slowly, as if talking to himself. 

“And I can tell from here you’re no better-prepared than either of these other two,” Bucky said. “None of you has any fuckin’ clue what they’ve got themselves into.”

“We know what we’re about, I told you,” Pipsqueak said angrily. 

“No,” Bucky said, “you fuckin’ don’t. I know you got Meathead on me with a gun but I can tell from the way he fuckin’ _breathes_ that he don’t have the training for it. And you still got that pilot light where I could get to it. And the stupidest thing you’re doin’ is that you’re leavin’ me alone down here with the fuckin’ microchip guy in my head. Bucky Barnes is a nice guy but he ain’t the only guy that lives in this skull, you know?”

“Well,” Chubby said, stepping forward a little into the light, and he was smiling slightly. “I have some interest, you know, in what else might be in that skull of yours.”

He had something in his hand, and Bucky’s chin went up reflexively as he realized it was a syringe. 

“Don’t,” Bucky said. “Don’t you fuckin’ dare.” But something like an electric shock went through him and he shuddered uncontrollably, jaw locking shut— Zola. Zola had done that. Zola had him— no— 

Chubby stuck the needle in his arm, right in the same abused deltoid muscle, and it burned going in with a horrible familiarity. He knew this one, Bucky knew this one— the Winter Soldier knew this one— and he screamed, not in pain but in unreasoning terror. 

“No,” he said, “no, fuck— not this! Not this!” 

But the burning made its inexorable way into his bloodstream and he slipped sideways out of his own head. 

 

* * * 

 

“Fuck, there’s another one,” Natasha said, and Steve stuck the shield to his back, wiped his forehead, and looked over her shoulder at her phone. 

The audio was tinny, but it was recognizably Bucky’s voice screaming. He was tied to a chair in a basement, and it was unquestionably a recent video; he was still wearing the button-down white shirt, hair short, and his nose was streaming blood. 

Winter Soldier, the caption read. Gone rogue again, fugitive, captured. 

“We only want to help you, Barnes,” an off-camera voice said. 

“Fuck you,” Bucky panted, eyes rolling, tipping his head back; he was visibly terrified out of his mind. 

“He could break that chair in a heartbeat,” Natasha said, frowning. 

“He could,” Steve said. He didn’t know how strong Bucky was but he remembered how hard he could hit, pretty damn clearly, and that was a flimsy metal folding chair. 

“You’re destabilizing,” the voice said. “We just want to get you back to someone who can take care of you properly.”

“The only reason you ain’t dead is I’m waitin’ for Steve,” Bucky said. 

There was a brief cut, and it came back to Bucky sitting slouched to one side, laughing and laughing and laughing. And it wasn’t Bucky’s laugh, not at all; it was chillingly alien, utterly unlike anything that had ever come out of Bucky’s mouth. 

The worst part, Steve thought, nearly biting through his lip, was that there was something familiar about that laugh. But it definitely wasn’t Bucky’s.

 

* * * 

 

“I told you,” Bucky pleaded, hoarse and desperate; his throat was dry, voice wrecked from screaming. “I told you not to fuck with this. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

They weren’t listening to him. They were talking among themselves, hooking something up with the camera. Meathead was the only one who looked unsettled, and he wasn’t nearly uneasy enough about what was going on, not at all. 

“He’s unstable enough, I guess, for it to work,” Pipsqueak was saying. 

“Well,” Chubby said, “they said they wanted a live feed. At this point I don’t think he’s capable of doing anything really contrary to our agenda, so the editing isn’t necessary.”

“You don’t know what you’re fucking with,” Bucky said again. The drug was wearing off, which meant he could resist Zola a little better. He’d done the electric-like-shock thing again a couple of times— they were almost like mini-seizures, and he seemed to be able to do them at will, and Bucky would rather die than get another dose of that fucking drug because it drowned him out and let Zola do whatever he wanted. 

“I just don’t,” Meathead was saying, but Chubby overrode him. 

“Look,” he said, “they said they don’t trust our edited shit, they want a live feed so they can verify it’s really him and not something constructed on a computer.”

“Fuckin’ idiots,” Bucky said, hollow with despair. 

“So we’ll get the live feed up, and they’ll call us and I’ll talk on the phone while I’m in the video, to verify that it’s truly realtime and not edited,” Chubby went on. 

“They’re going to use it to get your location,” Bucky said. “Jesus Christ almighty.”

Meathead was, unsurprisingly, the only one who seemed to be listening. “Can they do that?” he asked. 

“Of course not,” Pipsqueak said. 

“Morons,” Bucky moaned. They set up the camera, turning it to face into the room, then Meathead and Chubby grabbed his chair and turned him to face it. The camera was perched about halfway up the stairs— apparently a tripod was too high-budget for them. Even apart from the angle making sense, it gave the most anonymous possible view of the blankest wall of the room, but it meant that Bucky was staring up the stairs now and could see daylight upstairs. The men fiddled with the camera and a computer set on the steps behind it, and Bucky analyzed the new view, deciding the basement steps opened onto a mudroom upstairs, and from there he’d have a straight shot out the house’s side door.

Chubby came over and stood behind him. “All right,” he said, and he was talking to the camera. “We are doing as you asked. We have dosed him with the drugs you recommended, and have sent you the recordings of the results. He should be just about clear of the last traces now.”

There was an electronic trill, and Bucky said, “They’re going to track that phone if you answer it.”

“They can’t,” Chubby said smugly. 

“You’re a fuckin’ idiot,” Bucky said. “Of course they fuckin’ can.”

“You’re from the 1920s, you don’t know how cellphones work,” Chubby said. He answered the phone. “I have done as you said.”

“Excellent,” said a voice, tinny but familiar.

Bucky raised his head and looked straight into the camera. “Wait, you’re streaming this live on the Internet?” he said. He could see from Meatball’s face that the answer was yes. “Oh my God.” He turned his head a little to catch Chubby in his peripheral vision.

“You should administer a second dose of the hallucinogen,” the familiar voice was saying, on the phone. 

“Don’t think I can’t hear your voice, Iago,” Bucky said. “Don’t think I haven’t matched your face up, Dupres. I know that’s you. Don’t you fuckin’ dare, Chubby, don’t you put any more drugs in me.”

“I have a dose being prepared now,” Chubby said into the phone. 

“I know who you are,” Bucky said. “I know who you are, Dupres. _You’re_ a disgrace to the flag, _you’re_ a fuckin’ traitor, and you’re usin’ that cellphone signal to track us down so you can kill these three jackasses and just take me. I know it.”

“You’re sure the previous dose has worn off?” Dupres said over the phone. “He seems a little…”

Chubby laughed. “Yeah, he’s probably still hallucinating,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s the drug, I think he’s just nuts.”

The only consolation, Bucky thought in a moment of still clarity, was that Stark could probably track that cellphone too, and if he was watching, then it was just a race to see whose tracker got there first. 

However, he might not be watching, in which case Bucky was fucked. 

Certainty crystallized, then, in Bucky’s worn-out mind: there was no more time to wait for Steve. “Sorry, Steve,” he said to the camera, “I was going to let you rescue me, but I don’t think I can wait any longer.”

“Here,” Pipsqueak said to Chubby, coming across the floor with a syringe held out.

Zola tried to do the electric-shock thing to him, but the novelty had worn off and Bucky could sort of power through it at this point. He collected himself, shivering a little as Zola tried repeatedly to shock him. 

“Can you believe these fuckin’ amateurs?” Bucky said, looking straight into the camera instead of staring in terror at the syringe like he wanted to. “Who uses handcuffs on a guy with one fuckin’ arm?”

Zola tried again to stop him, but he jerked to his feet, breaking the chair, and his legs were tied to the legs of the chair, not together, so he could move them freely. It took a lot more force to get his prosthetic off than he’d expected— he dislocated the fucked-up left shoulder in the process, screaming because _fuck_ that hurt, but after that it was just another ruthless twist and a yank to rip out the sensory transmitters. 

That washed over him in a white wave of agony, but he stumbled through it, pushed himself up, and now his right hand was handcuffed to a handy-dandy metal club and his three captors were all staring at him in stupid dumbfounded shock. 

Meathead recovered first, and shot him. The bullet tore brutally through Bucky’s lower abdomen but missed the spine, missed the liver, missed the kidneys, spun him but not enough to stop him, and so Meathead was the first to die, as Bucky used the prosthetic as a club to smash his jaw straight across the field of view of the camera. 

His second swing took Pipsqueak down, straight down on his skull, smashing the hypodermic with a third swing, and then he spun to face Chubby, who was standing frozen in horror, spattered with blood— Bucky’s blood, from the exit wound of the bullet. 

“I told you,” Bucky said raggedly, “not to fuck with things you couldn’t possibly understand,” and Chubby dropped the cellphone and pulled out his gun and fired. 

Bucky stepped around the bullet, avoided the muzzle blast, and hit Chubby so hard his neck snapped and he fell boneless to the floor. Bucky followed him down, landing on his knees, cradling the injured ripped-up arm, pressing his hand to the giant fucking hole in his gut. “Fuck,” he said tightly, “fuckin’, _fuck_ , that fuckin’ _smarts_.” 

The cellphone made a tinny noise and he gritted his teeth and groped for it. “I’m fuckin’ _coming_ for you, Iago,” he said into it. 

“We’re on our way to you, Barnes,” Dupres said, amused. “Thanks for saving us the trouble of killing those idiots.”

“Fuck you,” Bucky said, and ended the call. He was shaking, his hand too unsteady to hold the phone, and he dropped it from blood-slippery fingers, and doubled over again. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck.” He looked up at the camera, still impassive on its stair-step perch. 

“Fuck,” he said to it, “they’re comin’ for me, Steve. I’m sorry, I tried to wait for you. I always fuck that up.” He was shaking hard, his whole body, and Zola gave him another weird jolt. 

“You are an idiot,” Zola said tightly. 

Bucky ignored him and scrabbled in the rapidly-growing pool of blood for the cellphone. He couldn’t remember anyone’s number, but he remembered the direct line for Stark Tower. As he dialed he dragged himself, knee-walking with agonizing slowness toward the nearest pistol, still in the loosely-curled fingers of the former Chubby. 

He stuck the cellphone between his ear and his shoulder and reached out to grab the pistol, fumbling with it. He couldn’t check the slide with one hand. He dropped it into his lap and collapsed against the wall, catching the phone as it slid down from its precarious hold between his ear and shoulder. 

“Thank you for calling the Avengers Tower and Stark Industries,’ the receptionist said, smooth and professional. “How may I direct your call?”

“Uh,” he said. He hadn’t really thought this through. Asking for Captain America had never worked out for him in the past. “Um. Fuck. Um, it’s— it’s Bucky Barnes, I’m— can you, like, trace this call or something? I couldn’t remember anybody’s direct line and I’m kind of, I got kidnapped by a bunch of fuckin’ amateurs and I don’t have an extraction plan.”

“Oh my God,” the receptionist said, and there was a click and a series of odd little noises, and she said “please hold” almost robotically, and Bucky stuck the phone between his ear and shoulder again and wedged his hand into the giant fucking hole in his gut, pressing down and hissing with the pain. He managed to pull his knees up to help keep pressure on the wound. The neural implants were screaming static. 

“Jesus Christ, Bucky,” Steve’s voice said in his ear, frantic and ragged, “what the hell did you do?”

“Did you find the livestream?” Bucky asked. “Was that really—“

“I’m looking at it right now,” Steve said. “Oh my God. It’s like a— it’s like a ten-second delay. Oh my God. We’re tracing the phone.”

“Hurry,” Bucky said, “Hydra’s got a headstart. It was Iago on the phone, Steve, Dupres— I, I think he’s higher up than I thought.”

“I heard,” Steve said. “Bucky. Jesus. Hang on, okay? Hang on.”

“I didn’t want to kill ‘em, Steve,” Bucky said. “The one that shot me, he was nice, I didn’t want to— but I had to.” He was pleading, like if he could convince Steve it would be okay. 

“You had no choice Buck, I saw,” Steve said, sounding a little choked. “It’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t want to kill ‘em,” Bucky said, blinking against his vision going grainy. “They were just idiots, they didn’t know what they were—“ He remembered, suddenly, that Hydra had a head start and was on their way. “Steve, I can’t— I can’t let ‘em take me, Hydra’s comin’.”

“Just hang on,” Steve said. “Even if they get there first, I’ll come for you, Bucky, I promise.”

“No,” Bucky said, “I can’t—“ He looked at the gun in his lap. “I don’t know how many bullets are in this thing, I can’t check it, I only got one hand. I can’t work the slide.”

“Just hold tight,” Steve said. “Bucky, just hold tight. It’s okay, even if they get you, I’ll get you back.”

Bucky pulled his hand out of the bullet wound and picked up the gun. His hand was shaking badly, but he wrapped his fingers around the grip, slippery with blood. He didn’t even know if the thing would work or if it was too gummed-up with his blood. “What if there’s only one bullet in it?” he said. “What if there’s only one? What if I only got one chance?”

“Bucky,” Steve said, “you don’t have to fight. You can put it down. You don’t have to fight back. I’ll come for you. I’ll come get you. Even if they recapture you I’ll come get you.”

“Yes,” Zola purred, in his head, “of course he will. Just let them recapture you. Of course he will come for you, like he did before.”

“No,” Bucky said, and fumbled the pistol up, pressed it to his own jaw. “No. Steve! No, I can’t— I can’t do that.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, and he could hear when the ten-second delay caught up and Steve saw what he was doing, “Bucky no! No, Bucky! No! I’ll come for you, I swear to God, Bucky, put it down!”

The phone slid from between his shoulder and his ear, and he didn’t have a hand free to pick it back up. He could hear Steve, tinny and frantic. “Bucky! Bucky! I swear to God! Don’t do this! Don’t do this!”

“Do you know,” Bucky said raggedly, closing his eyes and feeling how the metal of the barrel was still warm from having been fired, “how long I waited for you, Steve, how long— fuckin’, _decades_ , Steve, I would still come out of cryo and I’d fuckin’ hallucinate you standin’ over that fuckin’ table, I didn’t even know your goddamn name and I still kept lookin’ for you, Steve, I kept lookin’—“

“I thought you were dead,” Steve cried, over and over, “I was dead, Bucky, I was dead, I’m not now, don’t do this to me, don’t leave me here!” 

“Surely,” Zola said delicately, “this is too dramatic even for you.”

Bucky’s hand was shaking almost too badly to hold the gun, and he knew he had to get pressure back on his wound if he wanted to stay functional. “I wanna believe in you, Stevie, I do,” Bucky said, and he put the gun down, grabbed the cellphone, and gathered his strength. “I wanna believe in you but I don’t know if I can believe in anything.”

“I’ll get you back,” Steve said, “I’ll come for you, Bucky, I’ll never let them have you.”

“They already have me,” Bucky said, and shoved the phone into his pocket without hanging up, shoved the gun in his waistband, and set his teeth, rolling to his hands and knees. It was agony, with his ripped-up torso, with his mangled arm yanking on abused ligaments and sending screaming static to the neural receivers, dragging the fucked-up prosthetic from the handcuff, but he got himself as far as the bottom step, toward the camera but more importantly toward the exit.

Steve was still yelling from his pocket. He knew he had to leave the phone connected. “Steve,” he panted, “Steve, quit yellin’, I can’t hear ya.” 

Fuck, that was as far as he could go. He pulled the gun back out of his waistband, leaned against the lowest step, and looked up the stairs. He set the gun and the cellphone on the step in front of him. “Steve,” he said. 

“We have a lock,” Steve said, hoarse and wrecked. “We’re on our way. I won’t let them have you, Bucky, I’ll tear the world down for you. I promise, I swear.” 

“They already have me,” Bucky said again, resting his forehead against the bannister. His vision was going grainy again, and he couldn’t get it back. He shoved his hand into the wound and pressed down, gasping at the pain. “Stevie. They already have me.” 

“But I’ll get you back,” Steve said, “I’ll come for you, no matter what, Bucky.”

“You know I love you,” Bucky said. It was no good. He was losing too much blood. Too much to hope it would kill him, but it would incapacitate him. He couldn’t get pressure on the exit wound. “I love you, Steve, and I’m sorry.”

“Stay on the line, Bucky,” Steve said, and there was a lot of wind noise on the other end, Steve was on the move. He’d never get here in time. “I need you to stay on the line.”

“I can’t,” Bucky said, “Steve, I can’t.” He still had his forehead pressed against the bannister, and rolled his head a little to look up the stairs, past the camera. It was right there, and he could hear the workings of the autofocus mechanism struggling to keep him in view. “It fucking figures,” he said, “that the fucking camera is between me and the exit.”

“Just stay still,” Steve said, breathless. “You’re losing a lotta blood, Buck.”

“Too much to hope that’d kill me,” Bucky said, closing his eyes. He was dizzy. He had a choice. Try to keep moving? Try to stay conscious and fight whoever showed up? Or take the safe way out and put the gun back in his mouth? He pried his eyes open and looked up at the camera, three steps up. It had a little screen off to one side that was showing— ah, it was showing the recording. Yup, Bucky was in the frame, mostly, and in pretty decent focus. He was even well enough lit. Great. 

“Just hang on,” Steve said, “Sam’s on his way, and we’re right behind him, but he’ll be there in like, two minutes. I swear, Bucky, we’ll beat ‘em.”

“I can’t shoot myself on-camera,” Bucky said, thinking out loud. It would almost definitely kill Steve if he did that. “I can’t stand up so getting out of here is kinda off the table. How many bullets you think are in this thing? Gotta be at least two?”

“James,” Natasha said suddenly; she must have grabbed the phone. “James, listen to me.” She was speaking Russian. “If you cannot believe he will find you, believe that I will.”

“Natasha,” Bucky said, “my programming— they have disrupted— _nng_ ,” and Zola shocked him again. It was enough that he couldn’t speak. “In my head,” he managed, “they woke— _nng_!” 

“You may not speak of me,” Zola hissed. 

 _Fuck you_ , Bucky answered, gritting his teeth. He picked up the gun again. Had to be at least two bullets. He looked at the camera and shot it, neatly, straight in the lens, then fitted the muzzle against the hollow of his jaw. “You won’t have me,” he told Zola, in German. 

“James!” Natasha was saying, as close to a shriek as he’d ever heard her, “James, Sam is there! Sam is there! He beat them, he is there, don’t shoot him!”

He heard it then. “Barnes!” It was muffled, at the door. “Barnes! Are you down there? Barnes, it’s Sam!”

He pulled the gun away from his jaw, slightly. “Sam,” he said. 

“Thank God,” Natasha said quietly, fervently. 

“I won’t shoot,” Bucky said. 

The door shuddered, then crashed open. Sam had a gun in his hand and goggles over his eyes and he was haloed in sunlight and he looked like an angel. “Barnes,” Sam said. 

Bucky stared at him, and his hand twitched— Zola— Zola was trying to move his hand. “No,” Bucky said, horrified, and forced his fingers open, dropping the gun. “No, Jesus—“

“We gotta hurry if we can,” Sam said, coming down the steps and shoving his goggles up on his forehead. Bucky picked up the cellphone and shoved it into his pocket, and looked up into Sam’s face as Sam came to sit next to him on the step. 

Sam’s eyes were a warm, deep brown, and his face was smooth with concern, determination— nobody had ever looked at Bucky like that. 

“Then let’s go,” Bucky said, gritting his teeth and giving Sam his hand to haul him up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was stuck on this chapter for a long time and burned through all my spare chapters, so I might have an interruption in the update schedule after this. But I was so determined not to miss a week on a cliffhanger, I put this up less-edited than I usually do. Sorry if there are inconsistencies etc., I just didn't want to leave Bucky hanging.
> 
> Lyrics from Nicki Minaj's [Anaconda](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8Q3ywwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DLDZX4ooRsWs&ei=TT05VIbVA6yZsQSX3IGwDg&usg=AFQjCNEBeKnpT3CXTaYn1INv9_Leioa36w&sig2=oF1H5RTBllzXuWdvfQQo6Q&bvm=bv.77161500,d.cWc), of course.   
> And references to Josephine Baker, whose [life story](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Baker) is goddamn fascinating and whose [legendary dancing style](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmw5eGh888Y) makes it perfectly plain that there is nothing new under the sun.


	11. Turn Up The Lights In Here, Baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve furthers his musical education, Bucky finds out about his immortalization in comic book/teddy bear form ("I was a scrawny twink in tights?" "Buck, that's politically incorrect"), Nicki Minaj's ass becomes a metaphor for freedom ("Some star-spangled patriot _you_ are"), and Natasha has A Suspicion.

Steve blinked awake. Dr. Montazeri was sitting in a chair next to him, absorbed in reading something on a smartphone. “Oh,” he said. “Hey.”

“Good morning,” she said. “I opted not to wake you.” She tapped something, and smiled at her smartphone.

“How long have you been sitting there?” he asked, rubbing his face. He needed to shave, something awful, and his mouth tasted like something had died in it. 

“A little while,” she said. “It was a good opportunity to catch up on some personal things.” She showed him the screen of her phone, which was filled with a slightly blurry picture of a laughing child of about two. “My granddaughter is infatuated with texting photographs and getting them in return, but I never have anything to take pictures of.”

Steve laughed. “I could take your picture,” he said. He assumed that if Bucky wasn’t okay, the doctor would not have sat quietly next to him for however long he’d been passed out here in the lounge on the medical floor. 

“She has seen plenty of pictures of me,” Dr. Montazeri said, and gave him a speculative look, but did not ask.

Steve sighed, having seen that look before. “We can take a picture of both of us,” he said, “and hopefully my disgusting unwashed unshaved face won’t scare her.”

“That would make my daughter’s day,” Dr. Montazeri said, looking hesitant but pleased. 

“Fine,” Steve said, making himself smile. It was no skin off his nose, and the doc was probably the nicest person ever to have fished a bullet out of his guts. He took her phone and held it out, putting his head next to hers and giving the forward-facing camera his best Captain America grin. 

The picture came out quite nicely, if he did say so himself. Steve had mastered the interfaces of pretty much every camera phone at this point, being long-armed enough to almost always be the one to hold the camera for selfies. He was very good at them. He should see if there was an article in there for Lakeisha, it sounded like it might be worth some kind of cultural analysis. The rise of the selfie. People had always taken them, it was just that they’d never come out well with old-style cameras. 

It was stupid to be nostalgic about old cameras. Bucky’d had one of those vest-pocket Kodaks for a while, but he’d never taken a photo that was any good. 

Dr. Montazeri grinned at her phone. “My daughter will be so amused,” she said. “My granddaughter will probably reciprocate.” She slipped her phone into her pocket, laced her fingers together over her crossed knee, and said, “So I suppose, after that silly interlude, we should get back to business.”

“How is he?” Steve asked, shedding the Captain America smile. 

“He will be fine,” she answered. “The gunshot wound did not impact anything critical, and his body was already healing the damage. He lost a lot of blood but, like you, he is very good at replacing blood volume rapidly. There is something fascinating about your spleens, both of you, that I am collecting data on but don’t think is applicable to regular humans. Still, it is interesting. Because it’s loss of blood that can cause so many other problems and complicate healing from injuries like that.” She shrugged, and smiled. “It means, in short, he’s fine.”

“What about his arm?” Steve asked.

“Ah,” she said sagely, “that is another issue.” She tilted her head to one side. “He dislocated his shoulder and caused a great deal of damage to the soft tissues. The remnants of his original prosthetic were held in place with metal supports driven through soft tissue and bones, and they caused a great deal of damage when he wrenched the whole assembly. He’s going to need extensive reconstructive surgery. But there had already been plans for much of it.” She shrugged again. “This actually makes it easier, because there is no need to try to salvage as much of what was there. But the reconstruction will have to be done in more phases, now.”

“Has he said anything?” Steve asked. 

“He’s been lucid several times,” she answered. “He is in good spirits when we can manage the pain, but has been very resistant to any kind of sedation or systemic medication, so we are relying heavily on local nerve blocks and the like. This is not unexpected, however, and he has been fairly calm about it.”

“I figured,” Steve said, “when you didn’t need me in there.”

“We haven’t needed to restrain him,” Dr. Montazeri agreed. “I would be very reluctant to do so.” She hesitated. “I… I saw some of the video, of how he escaped. And I wouldn’t… I understand, now.”

Steve nodded; there was nothing to say to that, really. “Can I see him?” he asked. 

“He’s mostly been asleep,” Dr. Montazeri answered. “I have been taking that as a hopeful sign that the pain management methods we are using, unorthodox as they are, are working for him.” She smiled, and stood up, stretching with a sigh. “I will take you to him now, I ought to check on the nerve block in his shoulder. He’s been burning through them in less than an hour.”

“Takes me 20 minutes,” Steve said, standing up and stretching too. Even this body didn’t really like sleeping in chairs, but muscle kinks tended to work themselves out, so he was less unhappy than he could have been. 

Dr. Montazeri gave him an amused look. “Not these,” she said. “These are a different kind. You should know, if you are seriously injured in the future, that your medical care will probably be significantly improved by the things we’ve had to come up with for Barnes.”

“Oh,” Steve said. She led him down the hallway and into a room that had been refurnished at his suggestion— carpeted floor, wooden-framed bed, curtains on the window, painted walls, a bookshelf in the corner, a floor lamp and a rocking chair, a nightstand with a little lamp and an alarm clock on it. The opposite of hospital-like, even with the oxygen hookups in the walls. 

Bucky was curled on his side in the bed, a huddled lump under the blankets. He stirred as they came in, and rolled onto his back, blinking up at Steve. “Hey,” Steve said. 

Bucky blinked again, and looked around the room, orienting himself. “Hey,” he said slowly, voice rusty and hoarse. He looked— wary.

“How you feelin’?” Steve asked, coming closer to the bed. He wanted to put his hand out, touch Bucky’s face or hair, but something about the blankness of Bucky’s expression stopped him. 

“I don’t,” Bucky said, and struggled visibly to find another word, mouth working soundlessly. “Like the drugs,” he said finally. “They keep—“ He grimaced. 

“We are trying to use as little medication as possible,” Dr. Montazeri said. “Are the nerve blocks holding up?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and suddenly he was speaking easier. “Yeah, they’re okay. That part is kind of nice.” He managed a ghost of his crooked smile, the bittersweet one, that was gone as soon as it started. “I appreciate how hard you’re workin’ and that you care how I feel about what happens to me.”

“I think I understand better,” Dr. Montazeri said, “now that I realize this has not always been the case for you.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “you could say that,” and he looked away, grim. He made a strange face, like he was struggling to speak again, but gave up, looking frustrated and hopeless. 

“Are you having trouble speaking?” Dr. Montazeri asked. 

“Only about—“ Bucky grimaced. “Some. Things.” He was breathing hard. 

“The medication you are on should not be interfering with the verbal parts of your brain,” the doctor said, frowning. 

“I’m okay,” Bucky said. He breathed, deep and slow. “It’s not the drugs I’m on now, it’s from before.” And he gave Steve such a plaintive look that Steve got over himself, took one more step closer, and put his hand to the side of Bucky’s face, pushing his hair back and resting his fingers against the soft skin of Bucky’s scalp. 

“What did they do to you?” Steve asked. 

Bucky made a face. “Just drugs,” he said. “Stirred up ss— some shit.” It was visibly difficult for him to get the last two words out. “That one. It’s like being a prisoner in your own body. I hate it.”

Steve nodded, working his fingers through Bucky’s thick hair. Bucky’s eyes half-closed and he leaned into it. “I’m sorry,” Steve said quietly. 

“Don’t you start,” Bucky answered. He sighed. “It was okay, Steve. As long as there was no cryo chamber, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t deal with.”

“Still,” Steve said. “You were waiting for me and I didn’t come. Again.” That had stabbed him like a knife, when Bucky had said that. 

Bucky grimaced and looked up at him. “I didn’t,” he said, “really mean to say that to you, Steve, it wasn’t fair.”

“It doesn’t make it not true, though,” Steve said. 

“Yeah, but,” Bucky said, and shook his head minutely. “I also cried for my mom and she didn’t show up, but that’s not her fault. And this— I could have busted out of there the first time I woke up, and I didn’t, because I’m an idiot. None of this really had to happen. It was stupid that I made you guys save me when I really could have walked out of there before it got serious. All because I was being stupid and soft-hearted.”

“No,” Steve said, “you had the right idea. And who’s to say it would’ve gone any smoother the first time you tried? At least this way we got Dupres to implicate himself. You know we successfully traced that cellphone. We’ve got him, Bucky.”

“It’ll never hold up in court,” Bucky said. “Even if you can prove that was him on the phone and even if you have a recording of it, it doesn’t prove he actually ever _did_ anything.”

“Doesn’t have to,” Steve said. “I’m talking about the court of public opinion. Your most vocal detractor established as definitely having a concrete connection to the men torturing you on video? Nobody’s gonna be able to say a damn thing.”

“Video,” Bucky snorted. “And there’s footage of me brutally murdering three men on that video, too.”

“One of whom shot you, another of whom fired a gun at you at point-blank range, and the third of whom was advancing on you with a syringe full of something that you very obviously did not want to have administered to you,” Steve said. “All three of whom had been involved in keeping you tied to a chair in a basement and chemically torturing you for over twenty-four hours.”

Bucky gave him a skeptical look. “I ripped my own fucking arm off and beat three men to death,” he said. “I am not going to win any popularity contests. I am definitely not getting a yearbook award for Most Easygoing.”

Steve blinked, and darted a glance at Dr. Montazeri, who was trying to stop herself from laughing. “It’s a thing,” she said, “in American high schools, you vote for things like Most Likely To Succeed and the like.”

“How the hell do you know about that,” Steve said, but gave up. Bucky was always faster at that shit than he was. “Never mind. Bucky, people generally think you did what you had to do.”

“I wish that video wasn’t online,” Bucky said. “I wish I— I wish nobody knew who I was. I wish it wasn’t, I wish people hadn’t seen that.”

Steve bent and pulled Bucky into an embrace, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s neck and pressing his forehead against Bucky’s raspy cheek. “Hey,” he murmured. “It’s okay, Buck.” 

Bucky hooked his fingers in the fabric of Steve’s shirt, at his lower back just above his waist, and held on. “I didn’t want to kill them,” he said quietly. “I wanted to be done killing.”

“They took that choice away from you,” Steve said. “It’s their fault.”

“I don’t get to have choices,” Bucky said, his voice very small and muffled in Steve’s neck. 

“Everything that happens from now on is your choice,” Steve said fiercely. “Everything, Bucky.”

Bucky made a very quiet, inarticulate noise of distress. “I can’t,” he said. “What they did— they activ— they— it—“ He shuddered, and threw his head back suddenly, and Steve recoiled, grabbing him by the shoulder as he realized he was convulsing. 

“Shit,” Steve said, and Bucky’s eyes rolled back and his nose was bleeding, and the doctor ran to the door and hit a button. 

“It’s a seizure,” she said grimly, “don’t restrain his limbs, you could dislocate joints. He’s had several— I thought they were the drugs wearing off, he shouldn’t be having any more.”

“What do I do,” Steve said helplessly, as Bucky shook violently, blood frothing out of his mouth. 

“Nothing,” the doctor said, and Bucky went limp as suddenly as he had started shaking. “Just make sure if he vomits he doesn’t choke on it.”

“Okay,” Steve said, numbly, blank. “Okay.”

 

* * * 

 

“I dreamed of you,” Natasha said quietly in Russian, stroking Bucky’s hair back from his forehead. He was either unconscious or asleep, deeply so; he’d been in and out, Steve had said, but mostly out. Steve had looked exhausted and she’d bullied him into going to sleep properly. If she’d done so by maybe implying her relationship with Bucky was closer than it was— because, well, what was it, really?— then it wasn’t really a lie, just an exaggeration. 

She shouldn’t speak to him in Russian, it would probably disorient him, but she couldn’t stand someone overhearing her. “That place,” she went on, mostly to herself. “Where you go when you dream, where you get trained while you’re under— I don’t think it was real. I think I dreamed it. But I dreamed of you in it, Djeyms, and while I dreamed, it was familiar, like I had been there before.” 

His hair was soft, though it needed to be washed; but dirty, it was less fluffy, less unmanageable, silkier. She’d have to help him figure out how to style it. It was clearly textured; long, its own weight pulled it mostly straight and manageable, but short it had a mind of its own and wanted to run wild. Clearly, Steve’s shampoo wasn’t going to do him any favors in the long run, and he’d have to come up with his own routine that suited it better.

“I dreamed we were lovers,” she murmured. “For years. But it was all patchy, and I don’t remember much of the dream.”

He sighed, and stirred. She bit the inside of her lip, wondering if he’d heard her. After a moment, he blinked. It took him a few tries before he managed to get his eyelids to stay up and longer still before he could focus on her, but he did eventually, and smiled. 

“Natalia,” he said. ‘They let you see me?” He was speaking Russian. 

“Of course,” she said. 

“I didn’t think they would,” he said, and took a deeper breath, yawning as he woke up. “You had to sneak in, before. And it was dangerous.”

“Really,” she said slowly. 

“My little spider,” he said fondly, taking her hand and twining his fingers with hers.

She stared at him. Someone had called her that once. Long ago. “Are you in pain?” she asked, to cover her unsettled confusion. 

He closed his eyes, eyebrows twitching. “No worse than usual,” he said. 

“You’re badly damaged this time,” she said. “Do you remember what happened?”

“No,” he said. He looked at her, considering. “You changed your hair,” he said. 

She reached up to touch her hair. She was wearing exactly the same style as she had been when they’d gone out to dinner. “It’s the same,” she said. 

He blinked at her, frowning. “It’s shorter,” he said. “You cut it.” He wiggled his fingers, vaguely gesturing at her. “You had it in a braid before.” 

Her hair hadn’t been long enough to braid in years. Not since before he’d last been defrosted. She shook her head slowly. “Bucky,” she said, and smiled to soften the comment, “I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.”

He looked slightly alarmed. “What did you call me?”

“Your name,” she answered slowly. 

His eyes were a little wide, and he cut them sideways in an expression that pretty clearly indicated that he was trying to orient himself. His mouth moved, and he bit his lip, then said, “Where did you hear that name?” He flicked his gaze up to hers warily. 

She blinked. “We had this conversation,” she said. “I asked what you wanted me to call you. You eventually settled on Bucky.”

He rolled both lips into his mouth, squinting. “I don’t remember,” he said, but relaxed a little. “You always called me James, I was used to that.”

“I call you that sometimes,” she said, considering. “Mostly because I don’t think Bucky is a suitably dignified name for someone I’m fucking.”

He blinked at her, then laughed. “Such a mouth on you,” he said fondly. His accent was old-fashioned. “Not so ladylike, my little spider.” 

“Did I tell you to call me that?” she asked, something twisting in her stomach. When would he have heard that nickname? 

He blinked up at her, alarmed again. “I don’t know,” he said. He thought about it, frowning.

It was a very early nickname, that she’d been called as a child, and she knew, for a fact, she had never mentioned it to him. Their conversation in the training room had been brief and never that deep. It was not the sort of thing that would have come up, nor would he have heard it from anyone else— it was most definitely not the sort of thing that a third party would speak of. That particular phrasing, the Russian diminutive, the possessiveness, they were lifted straight from one of her earliest memories, and she had never told anyone, as an adult. 

That she could remember, anyway. 

“Hey, Natasha,” Steve said quietly in the door behind her. “He’s awake again?” 

Natasha smiled at him, and looked back at Bucky, who was staring at Steve like he’d seen a ghost. “James?” she asked. 

Bucky opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Steve,” he said. “Hey.” He blinked a few times, looking very, very unsettled. “I— uh— that was weird.” He was speaking English now.

“What?” Steve asked, coming in and sitting next to Natasha. 

Bucky’s eyes slid slowly from Steve to Natasha, mouth slightly open. “I, uh, I was somewhere else.”

“You’ve had a hard couple of days,” Natasha said. 

“Did I make that up?” he asked. He switched to Russian. “Did I make all that up, that you had longer hair and you went by Natalia? Because I remember it, so clearly, I remember you, I remember we were both with the KGB, I remember we had to meet in secret, I remember I called you my little spider.”

Natasha shook her head slowly. “That was a nickname of mine as a child,” she said, “but I have never told you that.”

“I think I’m missing something important,” Steve said. 

“They found out,” Bucky said, switching seamlessly to English without seeming to acknowledge Steve at all, “and they punished us both, they wiped me and froze me, they told me they sent you away.”

Natasha shook her head. “I don’t,” she said, and stopped. If she had been wiped as well… but… “What year?”

“I don’t remember,” Bucky said. “But you remember? Do you? I’m not crazy, you remember?”

He was almost pleading. She had nothing, no memory of it, and she watched his expression change as she didn’t react. “Wait,” Steve said, “you knew each other before?”

“I _loved_ you, Natalia,” Bucky said, switching back to Russian, plaintive and soft, eyes huge and tragic, “I loved you.”

“What year,” she said again, “I need to know what year,” because of course there were gaps of time that didn’t add up in her memory. 

“I should go,” Steve said very quietly, “and let you sort this out.”

She reached out without looking and grabbed his arm. “No,” she murmured, “stay.”

Bucky shook his head. “I have no context,” he said, in English again, “I don’t know what year it was. But it was a long time, Natalia.”

She swallowed hard. “Was I a child?” she asked, very carefully.

Bucky looked horrified and affronted. “No!” he said. “No, I— no! That’s— Natalia! No, it wasn’t that at _all_.” He swallowed hard, face creasing in disgust. “I wouldn’t— with a _kid_.”

“Calm down,” she said, “I’m not accusing you. James, I was born in 1984. We know what dates you were out of stasis, we can work this out.”

He shook his head slowly. “It was longer ago, though,” he said. “You were my age, or near to. I remember—“ He frowned. “I remember it was when I had the old arm.”

“I was born in 1984,” she repeated gently.

“Natalia Alianovna Romanova,” Bucky said, slowly, as if he were tasting the syllables of her name, and it made her shiver. He was looking down, eyes moving as if to capture more details, and she wasn’t prepared when his gaze snapped up to hers. “They wiped you,” he said. “You told me they never wiped you but that can’t be true.”

“Never totally,” she said, transfixed by his expression.

“I wasn’t supposed to know my name,” he said. “I remember that. The fact that you knew my name— that was the damning mistake, someone heard you say it.”

“You don’t remember at all?” Steve said quietly. 

Bucky was staring at her, and she had to look away. “I know they took things from me,” she said. “But I don’t— I don’t think I’m missing enough time for it to be true.” The dreams— but they had been dreams. That couldn’t have been— the time didn’t work. Couldn’t have been real. 

Bucky let his breath out slowly. “Maybe I’m getting you mixed up with someone else,” he said, but she could tell he didn’t believe that. 

“That must be it,” Steve said, and she knew he didn’t believe it either. 

“Her hair was long and red,” Bucky said, switching back to Russian and speaking quietly, not looking at either of them. “She did ballet exercises in the mornings. She often had nightmares about a house fire, and woke calling out for her mother.”

A chill went down Natasha’s back, but she said nothing. He couldn’t know that. He _couldn’t_ know that. The Winter Soldier had only ever come to their training facility the one time. “I will have to look at the dates,” she said quietly, in English for Steve’s benefit. “I know what dates I am missing.”

Bucky nodded. “I,” he said, back to English, “I may well be confused. There are still a lot of gaps, I don’t think I’ll ever get it all back.” 

“Is he awake or what?” Tony asked from the door.

“Give us a minute, Tony,” Steve said.

“No,” Bucky said, “no, it’s okay. I think we ran that conversation into the ground.” He was sort of disturbingly lucid, and looked alertly at Tony. “Are you here to talk to me about the trainwreck of my body?”

Tony grimaced. “You’re kind of fucked, kid,” he said. 

Natasha stood. “Here,” she said. “Take my chair.”

 

* * * 

 

The upshot was that they couldn’t put another prosthetic on the existing arm. It was too damaged. The choices were to undergo brain surgery to remove the neural receivers, or to amputate what was left of the left arm, and replace a number of the bones of the shoulder structure with advanced hybrid metal/bone reinforcing structures which were, of course, state of the art, and could support the most complicated and elaborate of the designs Tony had come up with for the arm.

There would probably also have to be brain surgery to upgrade the neural implants, but they’d be much much better and it would be less invasive surgery than the removal.

Something nagged him about that, something he couldn’t remember. Something about the neural implants. He wanted Tony to look at them, there was something he needed Tony to find, but he just— he just couldn’t remember what. He couldn’t find the words to express it, and he didn’t know what he was trying to express. 

“Take the busted arm off,” he said, instead. “It’s not doin’ me any good as it is.”

“You sure?” Steve asked. “Conventional medical wisdom—“

“Conventional medical wisdom holds I should’ve died in 1944,” Bucky said. He knew, he’d researched amputations and prosthetics. Conventional medical wisdom told you to keep as much of the original limb as possible, even if a full prosthetic was more functional. “I want it gone, it’s only a reminder of the shit that’s been done to me. Take the whole thing, start over. That’s what I want. Just— do whatever you want. Make it right. Whatever.”

“You just want me to do whatever I want,” Tony said skeptically. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “You’re a genius and this is your thing. I’m sick and tired of being in pain all the time. That’s literally all I really care about. Ideally, I want it to be something I can use, I want it to not hurt me so much, if possible I’d like it to be something that can be disconnected for maintenance or to slip handcuffs or whatever without leaving me screaming and bleeding, and I’d really prefer it to have some kind of feedback so I can tell how hard I’m holding something. But that is all I want.” 

“Okay,” Tony said. 

“Tony,” Steve said, a little warningly. 

“No,” Bucky said, “Steve, I’m serious. The thing is, Tony’s going to do what he likes, and he’s good at what he does, so it’ll be good. If it turns out later I change my mind, I bet you anything it’ll be easy enough to change it. In the meantime, I want it done and done right so I can stop fucking _hurting_. So I’m telling the engineer, do the thing, do the thing that’s right, and do it so I don’t ever have to go through this again.”

Steve was staring at him, inscrutable, but Bucky knew what that look was anyway, it was a Steve who was reconsidering his perspective. And that was the thing about Steve, he was so goddamn smart. 

“The man has a point,” Tony said. And it was the wrong thing to say, it was easy to see that. Tony and Steve had two personalities that just didn’t mesh. 

“Of course I do,” Bucky said, annoyed so Steve didn’t feel obliged to be.

Tony gave Bucky a considering look, and said, “Steve, he’s right. Whatever I put on there, it can be changed later. You know I’ll make it upgradeable, downgradeable, backwards-compatible, whatever. He can always change his mind. The only irreversible part is that we’re going to make it stop hurting him.”

Okay, so Tony wasn’t really as bad as he pretended to be. He had at least some clue. 

Steve sighed. “Okay,” he said, “if that’s what you want, Bucky.”

“It is,” Bucky said. 

Tony fidgeted with his tablet for a moment. “I, um,” he said. “I studied the other one a fair bit. I was thinking that at least for the first version of the new one, I should make it as similar to the old in functionality as I can, so I’m going to make the balance very similar— though it’ll be lighter, overall, I’m still going to try for a similar balance point— and use the same system for positional awareness. We can upgrade all of that in future, but I thought to minimize the initial learning curve— plus, the engineers that designed the old one had a better grasp on that particular technology than I initially did, and I haven’t made that much progress since.”

“That would be kind of nice,” Bucky said. “I remember… sometimes when they changed the thing it took me a long time to adjust. It was uncomfortable.”

“I know the one we had on you most recently was really uncomfortable,” Tony said. “I want to avoid that.”

Bucky nodded. “See,” he said to Steve. “It’ll be okay.”

“It’ll be major surgery for you,” Steve said. “And a long recovery.”

Bucky nodded again. “But once it’s done I won’t have to go through it again,” he said. “The last four or five times they’ve had to go in and add reinforcements were really awful, Steve. I’m done with that. I want it all done at once.” 

He could see that Steve was very upset at that thought, but was trying not to show it— he didn’t like Tony seeing him emotional, that was pretty obvious. Bucky reached up and yanked Steve down by his arm so he could ruffle his hair. “It’s gonna be okay, Steve,” he said. 

 

* * * 

 

In the video Bucky was pale, hollow-eyed, a little puffy-faced, and wrapped in a blanket, propped in a chair. “I wish people weren’t watchin’ that video,” he said. Unlike in previous videos, he didn’t seem to be addressing the camera directly; it was more like he was having a conversation with someone that happened to be being filmed. “I don’t like—“ He bit his lip. “What happened. It was,” and he stopped and grimaced, tried again. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I could’ve busted out of that chair any time but I knew I’d have to be violent and I just didn’t want to, I was hoping something else would come up and I wouldn’t have to. But I should’ve, I shouldn’t have waited as long as I did. I just. They were amateurs, and they didn’t know what I could do, and—“ 

He broke off, chewing his lip and looking down, visibly distressed. “I’m, the thing is, the drugs they used on me— they broke things loose, in my head—“ He gestured absently with his remaining hand. He hadn’t looked at the camera one time, and didn’t now. 

There was a cut, and now he was looking at the camera. “I didn’t mean to kill anybody. I didn’t want to. They shouldn’t have done what they did but it’s, they didn’t deserve to die like that for it. And it’s— there’s video of it, I wish people wouldn’t watch that. Nobody should see that. Their families shouldn’t have to see that.”

Another cut, and he was facing away, profile to the camera. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m just— I’m sorry. There’s enough— pain in the world, and— if I could make it right I would.” He grimaced, twisting his head to one side a little, then shaking it. “It’s just, they’re still out there. The people who— who made me a monster. And they’ll— they’ll make more monsters. And I can’t— I can’t let that happen, you know? If I can, if I can stop them, then maybe— what I, what happened to me, maybe then it wasn’t, you know, all for nothing?”

He shook his head again, looked down and away. “Maybe that’s selfish and I’m only makin’ it worse. I don’t know.” He turned his head back toward the camera, eyes still downcast. 

“It’s just,” he said slowly, “to have a choice, you know? It means— if you can choose, to do the right thing? It’s hard to know what the right thing is but— but it’s my choice.” He looked up at the camera. “Even if it doesn’t work out, at least I can _try_.”

The screen faded out, with a brief flash of the #savebucky hashtag, and then a shortened URL where Lakeisha was keeping a running tally of the publicly-shareable details of the kidnapping incident. Including the allegations against Councilman Dupres. Who could not be reached for comment.

 

* * * 

 

Steve was wearing a plain white t-shirt, and looked tired, sitting on a stool in front of a plain wall with the strong white daylight falling across him from a window. “Bucky’s not doin’ so good,” he said. “So the thing is, I don’t know what people think.” His manner was sharper than his usual public speaking persona, harsher— he was angry. “I don’t think people know much about what the super soldier serum, and its various knockoffs like what they did to Bucky, actually did. It didn’t make us impervious. It didn’t make us invulnerable. I can still get hurt. And I feel pain just as much as I ever did before. I just heal faster. But it still hurts. It’s still real unpleasant to get shot.”

He looked away, jaw working, and swallowed hard. “What they did to Bucky— the drugs, the things they put in him— he’s so freaked out by it, given his history, given all that happened to him— he won’t even take anything for the pain, now. He’s so afraid he won’t know what’s real anymore, he’s so terrified of becoming a prisoner in his own body again— he won’t even take a goddamn aspirin.” 

He shook his head tightly. “He took a bullet to the gut, he ripped out the attachment points for his prosthetic arm, he tore up all the connective tissue, the tendons and muscles and all that, in his left shoulder— he had a ton of damage there already from when he got shot a couple weeks back— and he did all that, he took all that damage, because he was so goddamn terrified of what they were going to drug him with.” Steve had been enumerating the injuries by counting on his fingers. “And you know what he asked me to say? He asked me to apologize again for him, that he had to kill those guys. The guys who— the guys who _did_ this to him. He’s, he’s goddamn _sorry_. He already apologized. And it’s all he can, it’s all he talks about, how he’s goddamn sorry.”

Steve shoved at his hair, rubbing the back of his neck, gestures sharp with anger. “I’m sayin’ all this stuff as Steve, not as Captain America. Just as a guy. Who’s Bucky’s friend. And it’s, I’m so, I’m just a guy.” He gestured, let his hand drop, let his breath out in a sharp sigh. “I’m just a person who’s worried about his friend. I hate to see him suffering like he is. After all he’s been through. I just, he’s a person. He’s a good person. Anyway. I’m just here because I wanted to say thanks to anyone who’s sending messages of support. He likes those a lot. And the people sayin’ nasty stuff, shame on you. I hope you never get hurt like that, I hope nobody ever treats you like that, because it’s awful. And Bucky takes it so personal. And he shouldn’t. And—“ He cut himself off, composed himself, looked down, then looked back up at the camera. 

“Anyway. I just.” He took a breath, let it out. “Thanks for the supportive messages, those of you who’ve, who’ve sent them. Um. And oh. He didn’t ask me to say this but I feel like I should. I’d also like to thank Nicki Minaj for her song and video Anaconda, because it’s just about the only thing that makes Bucky happy. It’s got like, five million views on YouTube and I’m guessing about a thousand of them are Bucky.” He gave the camera a crooked smile. “I’ve seen it about three hundred of those times, so.” He gestured. “She’s very talented, I’ll give her that.”

He looked at someone past the camera and grinned. “Yeah, that’s— that’s it.” He glanced into the lens, grinning, saluted the camera, and said, “Rogers out.” The screen went black and in small blue text said #savebucky and the short URL of the info page.

 

* * * 

 

People started sending flowers and cards and stuffed animals and things to the tower. Bucky had relented on the painkillers, too fucked-up to resist letting them drug him anymore once they removed the remnants of his left arm and started putting the metal reinforcements in. It made Steve sick to see how much agony it put him through to splice metal into the bones— glad that they could relieve it, but sick thinking of all the times they’d done nothing for that same kind of pain.

 So, Bucky was spending more than twenty hours a day asleep by that point, and didn’t really understand what the gifts that kept showing up actually were. Steve made the executive decision to send most of the flowers and stuffed animals onward to decorate the pediatric ward of the closest hospital, and put up a post asking people to make donations in Bucky’s name to a veterans’ charity (which was as close as he could figure to what Bucky had somewhat incoherently said, though he’d perhaps been talking about something else entirely; in that conversation he’d also expressed undying love for Steve, had referred to his job at the machine shop, and had asked after his mother, so it was anyone’s guess how much he’d really understood). 

But Steve kept a list of the names of everyone who’d sent anything, and filled up Bucky’s room with a representative sampling of plants and stuffed animals. There were over three dozen Bucky Bears and counting, and he kept all of them. Bucky could donate them somewhere if he wanted; meanwhile, they were probably going to be useful for some sort of prank in the short-term. One of the Bucky Bears was homemade, a gorgeous specimen of hand-crafting, and it had a beautifully hand-stitched quilted lamé metal left arm. Steve set that one aside, and Natasha stole it, put it into Bucky’s bed next to his sleeping face (he snuggled up adorably to it in his sleep), took a picture, and posted it online. 

The picture got picked up by several news outlets. Steve caught a snippet at one point where they juxtaposed the photo with a brief clip from the video, of him lying on the stairs with his forehead pressed to the bannister, picking up the gun and looking up, grim and bloody-faced, and shooting the camera. 

Bucky woke up long enough to Tweet that Natasha’s habit of taking pictures of him when he was asleep was creepy. Natasha retaliated by posting a video of him with the bear. 

He was sitting in bed, hair a wild disaster and eyes bleary, face puffy with sleep, torso just a mass of bandages with a patch of disinfectant-stained skin sticking out near his neck, and the edge of a healing pink incision held shut with a disconcertingly-complex black knot of stitchwork, left arm conspicuously, completely absent, and he was holding the bear. “This is wild,” he said indistinctly. “Somebody sewed this.” He fiddled with one of the buttons on the front; it had a one-sleeved blue quilted jacket with a double row of tiny buttons, real buttons, sewn on. “And they gave it to me? Why did they give it to _me_? It’s really cute.”

“It is really cute,” Natasha said, off-camera. Bucky put the bear down to rub his face with his hand, then paused, looking down at it, expression softening.

“Look at that,” he said quietly, and turned the bear so the metal arm faced upward. 

“What?” Natasha said. 

He picked it up so she could see it. Instead of the red star, the arm was adorned with a blue-edged applique of the wing device that had adorned the sleeve of Bucky’s coat when he was a Commando— the design from the side of Captain America’s cowl. Bucky chewed on his lower lip, tracing the wing symbol with his finger. “I like that,” he said. “I like that a lot. That’s really neat.” His smile was crooked, uneven and sweet, and he looked up at Natasha as she ended the video. 

She posted it with the caption “Bucky’s adorable when he’s high. There’s only one painkiller that works on him and it makes him regress to about five.”

 

* * * 

 

“James,” Natasha said, stroking his hair back from his forehead. He sighed, and opened his eyes and looked at her sleepily. He was in her bed; he’d showed up at her apartment door at two in the morning completely mute, eyes haunted and beseeching, and she’d pulled him into her bed and wrapped herself around him while he shook and shook but said nothing.

“Natalia,” he said. 

“You can talk now,” she said. 

“I had a bad dream last night,” he said, a little tersely. 

“I figured,” she said, playing with his hair, but he didn’t lean his head into her touch like he normally did. “Do you feel better?”

“I could use another dose of painkillers,” he said, frowning. He looked around. “I should go.”

“You can stay,” she said. “I have a dose here, against just such an eventuality.”

“You were so sure I would come to you,” he said, and there was something like disdain in his tone. “I am so predictable?”

She blinked at him. “James, there aren’t very many places you could get to,” she said. “It’s not an unreasonable assumption. Steve does smother you a bit.”

“Of course, darling,” he said, relenting, and she smiled sweetly at him and snuggled close, absolutely certain that this was not Bucky at all.

 

* * * 

 

“You gotta explain the bears to me,” Bucky said. He was still holding the handmade Bucky, fiddling with the buttons. He’d been awake close to an hour so far today, had eaten solid food— the gunshot wound was healed enough, the doctor said, and he had demolished two grilled cheese sandwiches and a half a pound of bacon in a possibly ill-advised binge that hadn’t yielded any unpleasant results yet— and had made Steve play him Anaconda twice. For fun they’d been exploring related videos, so now Steve not only knew Nicki’s entire back catalogue but also had a better grasp of the convoluted relationships of the modern hip-hop community than Sam did. Which made the whole thing almost worth it. 

(Steve’s favorite song of the group was Kanye West’s “All Of The Lights.” He just really liked the video, and couldn’t say why. And the hook was catchy. He wasn’t quite ready to confess to Bucky that he wasn’t sure whether he had a bigger crush on Rihanna or Kanye, though. Rihanna was beautiful but Kanye was a very, very charismatic man. He and Bucky were in complete agreement about Nicki’s ass, though, and especially the way she very definitely used it on her own terms. That was what was _really_ hot about it, and Bucky explained that was why he liked watching the video so much— not that it was well-shaped, but that it was so entirely _hers_ to do with as she wished. “Sure, Buck,” Steve had said, “sure.” Bucky had cussed him out for not caring enough about Freedom. “Some star-spangled patriot _you_ are,” he’d said.)

“The bears,” Steve said blankly, then caught up. “Wait, you never— you never saw the comic books?”

“The comic books,” Bucky said. 

“That’s a no,” Steve said. “Hang on.” He went down the hall— they were in the living room, Bucky a blanket caterpillar on the couch— and came back in a moment with the box of reissued trade paperbacks the comic company had sent him. (He’d signed a bunch for charity, and they’d given him a set.)

“What the hell is this,” Bucky said. “Wait. There was comic books of you during the war. These aren’t them.”

“No,” Steve said, “these came later. There was a revival, we came back into fashion. And for some reason they made you wear a costume too. You weren’t a sergeant, you were a special agent. And you were a kid, for some reason, like a teenager.”

“That’s dumb,” Bucky said. “That’s so— wait a minute— is _that_ me?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. 

“Oh my God,” Bucky said. “What— with the mask? Oh my _God_.”

Steve had to laugh, then, long and hearty, at the expression of dismay on Bucky’s face that only grew as he paged through the comics. “Christ Almighty,” Bucky said, “I’ve never said _golly_ in my life. And tights! I’m wearin’ fuckin’ tights!”

“Superheroes do,” Steve said smugly. “I started a trend.”

“Jesus,” Bucky said, disbelieving. After a hilarious interlude of exclaiming over the improbability of their comic book adventures (Bucky dubbed himself ‘a scrawny twink in tights’ and Steve told him that was politically incorrect), he shut the book and said, “Okay, but what’s with the bear?”

Steve laughed again; he hadn’t laughed this much in a long time. “There was a special edition,” he said, and picked up volume 3 and leafed to the end, where the issue was in the collection. “Where everyone was a baby. And you were my teddy bear.”

“What,” Bucky said flatly, taking the book. “Oh my sweet Lord. That’s— not right.”

“It’s fucking adorable,” Steve said. “Look at his little jacket!”

“Who are all these other people?” Bucky asked. 

“It’s a crossover with another line of comics,” Steve explained. “They’re all other superheroes. Some of them are real. Most of them are fictional. There are a lot of fictional superheroes now.”

Bucky squinted suspiciously at him. “How do you know who’s real and who’s not?”

“Mostly the real live active ones don’t have many comics,” Steve said. “And a lot of the fake ones are obvious knockoffs of real ones.”

“Superman,” Bucky said. “He’s a knockoff of you.”

“Only, I don’t fly,” Steve said. “Also I think he’s Jewish.”

“Course he is,” Bucky said. “You _should_ fly, though. Why don’t you?”

“I’ll get practicing,” Steve promised. 

Bucky turned the page. “So I’m the damsel in distress,” he said. 

“Well,” Steve said. “Kind of.” 

“And just from this I’m suddenly a bear,” Bucky said. 

“Well,” Steve said, “they made a limited-edition plush toy, and it got real popular, and it’s kind of been a staple toy in households for like a generation now, so, yeah. It’s a whole— thing.”

“Wow,” Bucky said. He picked up the stuffed bear again, and turned it over. “I’m a cuddly plush toy. Except, of course, it’s not me, it’s a fictional character based on my name and literally nothing else about me.”

“Well,” Steve said. “Sort of. Right.” 

Bucky contemplated the bear. “That’s kind of awesome,” he said finally, giving Steve a crooked, mischievous grin. 

“The only thing that character really has in common with you is how important he is to Steve Rogers,” Steve said. 

“That’s sappy as fuck,” Bucky said, but he looked pleased.

 

* * * 

 

The enormous quantity of store-bought Bucky Bears wound up in a filmed prank once Bucky was up and moving. The camera came on as Bucky shuffled down the hall, one-armed, in a navy blue dressing gown and white-starred blue pyjama pants, short hair sticking up wildly, feet encased in old-mannish bedroom slippers. He yawned, rubbed his stubbly face, and opened a door— 

And was buried in an avalanche of stuffed animals. “What the—“ he said, and staggered back, flailing. He lost his footing and sat down on the carpeted floor with a thump. There was a stunned pause, and then he started laughing, so hard he fell over onto his side and curled up, wheezing. The camera cut, and came back with him sitting against the wall, about twenty Bucky Bears in his lap, still pink-cheeked and unsteady with laughter. “What, you just _had_ all these?” he said. 

“No,” Steve said, off-camera, “people sent ‘em to you. While you were out. They sent flowers and cards and stuff, I showed you.”

“I don’t— oh yeah.” Bucky’s face went distant with recollection. “Yeah, I remember there were all those flowers— wait, people sent those for _me_?” His eyes went comically wide, looking off-camera at Steve. “Why? There’s nobody who even knows me.”

“People who saw your videos,” Steve said, “or even just some who read your story in the papers, they thought it was awful and they sent you get-well cards. Or,” and he made a noise suspiciously like a giggle, “sent you stuffed animals.”

“You’re f——n’ kiddin’ me,” Bucky said, eyes wide in flat astonishment. 

“I donated most of them to the children’s hospital,” Steve said, “but there were just so many Bucky Bears, I wanted you to see ‘em. I figured you could decide what you wanted to do with those.”

Bucky looked around at the pile of stuffed animals, which indeed were all Bucky Bear toys, then looked over at Steve, face blank in disbelief, shaking his head slightly. “That can’t possibly,” he said, shook his head again. “But nobody even _knows_ me.”

“I kept a list of everybody who sent somethin’,” Steve said, “and I took a picture of each thing before I passed it on, so you could see. I just, it was a lot and there wasn’t room, and the flowers woulda died. You were out a long time.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and his voice was suspiciously thick. He looked dazed. “There’s like, fifty of these,” he said.

“A lot of people want you to get better, Buck,” Steve said. 

“That’s really,” Bucky said, and stopped, looking away, choked up. He swallowed, hard, and blinked a few times. “Why?” he asked, looking helplessly over at Steve, and a tear rolled down his cheek. Steve moved into the frame of the video and wrapped his arms around Bucky. 

“I’m not the only person who sees you like you are,” Steve said, muffled in Bucky’s shoulder. His back filled most of the frame now, and Bucky’s hand slid across his shirt before the fingers tangled in fabric and held on. 

The frame stilled and faded slowly to black, briefly showing the #savebucky hashtag and the [avengers.org](http://avengers.org) URL, and under that, in italicized white print, the sentence _thank you for your support._

 

* * * 

 

Steve wasn’t surprised to find Bucky sitting in the living room, curled on the couch with headphones on and a laptop perched on one knee and the arm of the couch. Bucky was healing well from the two preparatory surgeries, enough to taper off the drugs and spend more time conscious, but he wasn’t up to moving around much yet.

Even with headphones on, even raptly attentive to the screen, Bucky still saw him come in. Steve hadn’t wanted to startle him, so it was just as well. Bucky pulled the headphones down, hitting the spacebar to pause whatever he was watching. “Hey,” he said. 

“Hey,” Steve said. “Couldn’t sleep?”

Bucky shrugged his good shoulder, which was progress; at first the other shoulder had hurt too badly for him to move either of them. “Usually can’t,” he said. 

“Painkillers wear off?” Steve asked. 

“Nah,” Bucky said, “it’s not that. It’s okay, I’m getting enough sleep one way or another.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. He sat down next to Bucky, giving him enough time to clear off the computer screen if he so desired. He didn’t, apparently, so Steve looked curiously at it. It was a music video, predictably, though this one looked like metal instead of hip-hop.

He had sat down very close and Bucky looked hesitant, maybe a little confused, but didn’t pull away. “Healing up okay?” Steve asked. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. 

“You must be looking forward to getting the final thing on there,” Steve said. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said. He was still tense against Steve’s side. 

“Am I sitting too close?” Steve asked, laying it right out on the table.

“No,” Bucky said quietly, “you’re— it’s— good.”

Steve ducked his head to look sidelong into Bucky’s face. “Yeah?”

“I had a lot of false memories,” Bucky said, not looking at him. He closed the laptop, pulled the headphones off, set both down on the side table. 

“So you said,” Steve answered patiently, waiting for the thought to unspool. He knew where this was going, he thought, but it never served him to assume.

“A lot of them were false memories of you,” Bucky said. “They put them in to confuse me, I think, since they knew they couldn’t rip all of you out. There was too much.”

“Oh,” Steve said. He wasn’t going to let on that Natasha had mentioned this to him. It had struck him then how terrible this would be, but seeing Bucky’s expression really drove home how heartbreaking it was, this thing in particular. “Oh no.”

“A lot of them were— well, they were of fighting or, um, of fucking,” Bucky said, gaze going even more indirect, kind of turning away a little like he was embarrassed. 

“Of _us_ fucking,” Steve filled in.

“Yeah,” Bucky said. He shifted a little in his seat. “I, um. I mostly, I think, I mostly figured out what was real and what wasn’t. I had— I had to— we did some stuff, right?”

Steve’s chest hurt a little. “Yes,” he said. “Bucky, we— yes.”

“But we never did— everything,” Bucky went on, awkward but game. 

“Right,” Steve said. “I, um. Right.”

Bucky nodded to himself. “Okay,” he said. “I just— I was afraid to ask, you know? Because if it was all fake, well— that would be kind of— that would be weird?”

“It wasn’t weird,” Steve said. “It was— it was just us, you know? How we were. It was, it was just _us_.”

Bucky nodded again, tightly, and Steve felt a thrum of tension, almost a shiver, go through him. “Okay,” Bucky said, nearly a whisper, and drew a tight little breath, almost a gasp.

They’d discussed this, Steve and Sam, and so Steve hesitated for only a second before turning and putting his hand to Bucky’s face, holding him and leaning in to press his mouth carefully against Bucky’s. 

Bucky made a broken little noise and opened his mouth, letting Steve tenderly deepen the kiss. It felt like coming home, like finally resolving an unanswered question, like a completion. “Bucky,” Steve murmured, and it wasn’t enough— he turned, and Bucky put his feet on the floor so Steve could climb into his lap, straddling his hips and reaching down to take his face between his hands, tipping his head back and kissing him hard.

When he pulled back, they were both breathing hard, and Bucky’s hand was balled-up in the back of Steve’s shirt. “Like that,” Steve panted. “Just— like that.”

Bucky stared up, dazed. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I— I remember that.”

“It was— we were almost always— to an extent,” Steve said, and it was hard to talk about. “From— pretty early on.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. He let go of Steve’s shirt, ran his hand up Steve’s back to his shoulder, down his ribs, around to his chest, and it felt so good, so right. Steve put his forehead down against Bucky’s. Bucky laughed suddenly, eyes closed, hand curled warm around the back of Steve’s shoulder. “I remember sittin’ with you like this and you were little,” he said. 

“Yeah,” Steve said, running his fingers along Bucky’s cheekbone, the curve of the back of his jaw under the ear. “I was littler than you for most of it.”

“You,” Bucky said, but bit it off. Steve kissed his nose, then pressed their foreheads back together. 

“Go on,” Steve said, and he kind of knew where Bucky was going. There was a silent moment, and finally Steve said, “You liked me better small.”

“No,” Bucky said, pulling back to look up at him. “No! Steve. No. I just—“ His expression softened. “Everyone talks about how you were suddenly— beautiful, and it always— I kind of. I always thought. You were.”

Steve had to kiss him for that, because Bucky had never said anything like that before but Steve knew it was true, remembered the way Bucky had always touched him, had always looked at him. Bucky had known his old body so well, and it wasn’t just its limitations he had known; it was everything.

“Here I thought you were just jealous I was bigger than you now,” Steve said. 

“No,” Bucky said, rubbing his thumb contemplatively across one of Steve’s collarbones. He looked up and laughed. “I mean, I was. But also.” He made a self-conscious gesture with his head, almost a shrug. “It’s not that there was nothing wrong with you before, and I’m not sorry all that stuff that was, was bad, got fixed. It’s just.” He made the gesture again. “I guess it’s selfish. I was used to it. I liked it. I never felt like there was anything wrong with… well, that’s a dumb way to say it.”

“I get it, though,” Steve said, and held Bucky’s face between both of his hands. “You’re the only person in the entire history of the world, I think, who would know that, who would say that, and I can’t tell you how, what it means to hear it.”

Bucky gave him a twisty half-smile, and Steve pulled him in and hugged him, tucking his jaw against Bucky’s ear and half-smothering him in his shoulder. Bucky stayed like that, passive, hand flat across the middle of Steve’s back. 

Eventually Steve realized Bucky had fallen asleep. 

 

* * * 

 

“So I kissed him,” Steve said, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. 

“Good,” Sam said, and even through the phone his voice was warm. He’d had to head back down to DC not long after they’d recovered Bucky from that basement, and Steve missed him awfully, _awfully_. “Good. I told you it was okay, Steve. I’m not gonna be jealous of Bucky.”

“I know,” Steve said, “you said, I just— I figure, I gotta keep you posted.”

“I do appreciate that,” Sam said. “But you gotta keep me posted so I can tell you what to do, right?” He laughed. 

“Well,” Steve said, “kinda.”

“Did he seem to want to do more than that?” Sam asked. “I mean, what did it all seem to mean to him?”

Steve laughed. “He fell asleep,” he said. “I think he just wanted the reassurance.”

“That’s kind of sweet,” Sam said. 

“He said,” Steve went on, and had to pause to collect his thoughts. “I made some crack about how he was jealous I was bigger than him, and he said…” He considered, and Sam waited patiently. “He said he didn’t like it when people acted like I suddenly was beautiful after I changed, because he’d never thought I wasn’t before.” 

“That’s really sweet,” Sam said, and seemed to genuinely understand it. Of course he did. He was Sam. He understood everything. 

“I never thought about it before but, yeah,” Steve said, “it kind of, it was never a conscious thing but I always felt a little funny about people making this big deal about my, about how I changed, y’know?”

“I bet,” Sam said. “I always kinda wondered about that. Like you were some hideous freak before or something. Didn’t look that way to me in the pictures, you just looked shorter.”

“I mean,” Steve said. “I _was_ basically crippled. That’s not exaggeration. And there’s no way I would’ve lived much past thirty, that’s not even— I pretty much knew that. So I get it, I do. It was a big deal to change me into, well, into this. I just. I wasn’t a _monster_.”

“And Bucky’s the only one who still remembers that,” Sam said. “See, this is why I got no right to be jealous or anything. I can’t give you that. I can say shit like that all I want but I wouldn’t know.” 

“I guess,” Steve said. 

“But I know I can give you things he can’t,” Sam said. “And I know I can give _him_ things _you_ can’t. So I’m not worried. You can’t afford to replace me. So you give him whatever you think he needs, because there’s all kinds of things only you can do for him. Don’t you worry about it.”

“I thought he was maybe going out with Natasha,” Steve said, “but she doesn’t really come around very much.”

“I don’t think Natasha’s the type who goes steady with people,” Sam said. “I really wouldn’t worry about that kind of thing. You do what seems right and don’t worry about it.”

Steve fiddled with the hem of his shirt again. It had shrunk in the wash and was too short, and he kept tugging it down and it had started to fray. He should probably hand this one down to Bucky. It was payback, satisfying payback, to give his too-small things to Bucky— payback for a youth of being the smaller and poorer of them, forever mending and making do with hand-me-downs from Barnes and Murphy cousins. Of course, the payback was less satisfying because Bucky didn’t care one bit, and once he had his final prosthetic he probably wouldn’t fit in smaller shirts anyway— the metal shoulder tended to take up a lot of room— but for the moment, it amused Steve.

“I guess I won’t worry,” Steve said. “I just, I worry I don’t know… what I’m doing.” He laughed. 

“I’m-a let you in on a little secret,” Sam said. “ _Nobody_ knows what they’re doing.”

 

* * * 

 

“I need you to tell me something, Clint,” Natasha said. 

Clint took a long pull from his beer, then looked over at her. “Something,” he said. 

“Ass,” she said, and threw a bottle cap at him. 

“You know I am,” he said, with a crooked half-grin. 

“I need you to tell me if you think Bucky’s all Bucky, or if there’s someone else in there,” she said. 

Clint regarded her over the mouth of the bottle, looking absolutely blank. “You mean like,” he said, but there was no need to finish.

“There’s something wrong,” Natasha said. “I know it’s hard to tell, what with how drugged he’s been. But sometimes when he tries to talk something seems to be holding his jaw shut. And I know the seizures have eased up but they struck me as so… purposeful. I think there’s someone else in there.”

“You’d spot it better than me,” Clint said. 

“I don’t want to say anything to him,” she said. “Because if I do, whoever it is will hear it too. And I honestly don’t know how aware of it Bucky is. But I don’t want to say it to anyone else either, because I’m not sure.” 

Clint nodded. “That’s tough. How would we find out for sure?”

“Well,” she said. “It’s not like we can just look.”

“It’s not like we haven’t,” Clint said. He took another drink. “You’d think Steve would notice.”

“He’s the last one who would,” Natasha said. “I mean. Not that he wouldn’t. But he’s already dealing with someone who alternates being more familiar than his own mother with being a person that horrible things have been happening to for years, and there’s so much there for Steve to wade through. He’ll have noticed right away something’s wrong, but _no shit_ something’s wrong, Clint. He’s not going to know the difference between regular wrong and this specific wrong.”

“I know Tony’s been over him with a fine-tooth comb,” Clint said. “He’s been reverse-engineering those brain implant things. If it was something with them, he’d’ve found it.”

“It could just be sleeper programming,” Natasha said. “That shit can be multi-level. I don’t even know how deep it can go, but Clint, there are times when I don’t know I’m going to do something until I’ve done it, and I’ve been about as thoroughly deprogrammed as a human can survive being.”

“I know that,” Clint said. And that was why she’d come to him with this. He’d been trained to watch her for it. He’d know what to look for. Better than Tony’s machines, and better than Steve with all the love in his heart. Sam might be able to spot it too, but he insisted on having a life in DC, and she had run out of energy to persuade him otherwise. 

Clint sighed, and finished the beer in his bottle. “So what do we do?”

“You keep an eye on him,” she said, “and I go back to the source to find out what I can.”

Clint turned his head to look at her straight on with both eyes. “The source,” he said. 

“The source,” she confirmed. “Some of it still exists. I still have contacts. I will see what I can find out.”

“You shouldn’t go alone,” he said. 

“I need you to stay here and watch him. No one else will understand how to look for what I suspect. And I won’t be alone,” she said. “I know my contacts are still good.” 

His mouth went tight as he considered that. “You’re sure,” he said. “Who can you even still trust?”

“The Black Widow,” she said. 

“Besides you,” he said. 

“I didn’t say me,” she said. She smiled, and pushed to her feet. “I’m not the only survivor of that program.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise everything is going to get better for Bucky. Everything is going to get *so much* better. 
> 
> My grasp of structure seems to have fallen apart but I'm telling myself it's intentional.


	12. This Is My Message To You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sam re-evaluates his life choices, Natasha is a creep as usual, Clint and Bucky bond over hearing aids, and more is discovered about whoever is residing in Bucky's head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics excerpted from [ Windhand's "Orchard"](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB4QtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9rSWN3Bm8WE&ei=8OZSVMCBI7DbsASZyoC4Dw&usg=AFQjCNHpBDU9_JC1IVQ4KqZfbipngBAYJA&sig2=J66hxA7L7Ywu-aPFIBqLpA&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc)from the album Soma  
> Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds"  
> The White Stripes "Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine"

 

 

It wasn’t all that hard, in the wreckage of HYDRA, for Regina Wells to worm her way to a higher clearance. She leveraged her close brush with the Winter Soldier to get herself access to his files, worked with them to track him down, gave them the information about the sensor in his elbow that would tell them when his blood had poisoned him enough to subdue him. 

If the strike team couldn’t capitalize on that, it wasn’t her fault. If she found the master list of all his takedown words and kept the highest-level of them to herself, well, that made sense; she didn’t want them to kill him foolishly to spare their own worthless lives. She’d put all this work into looking him up, after all.

And when she found the schematics for the neural implants and immediately recognized that there were more inputs than there were neural circuits, perhaps she didn’t bring that to anyone’s attention right away but it was only, of course, because she wanted to first find out what the extra inputs were for. 

Zola. They were for Arnim Zola. He had been something of a myth during her time there, poorly-understood. Theoretically he had become an AI, and it had been destroyed in the downfall of HYDRA, but surely there had been backups, and she eventually found one of them, running quietly and mostly talking to itself on a poorly-networked, obsolete old set of servers humming on a rack in a poorly-staffed base. 

He was delighted when she knew who he was, and was overjoyed that she knew so much about the Winter Soldier. He had been one of his pet projects, after all. He gleefully admitted to her, immediately, that of course he had been human once, and gave her all of the files that still existed on the man to peruse at her leisure. 

At home, at night, in her comfortable suburban home, Regina Wells read about James Barnes, native of Shelbyville, raised in Brooklyn, of the NY 107th, and read everything about him on the Internet, and followed it up by finding his Twitter. From there she watched the videos, both HYDRA’s and the ones hash tagged #savebucky. All of it, she absorbed with the echoes in her memory of the man’s grim, desperate face, hard mouth and frightened eyes, as she’d repaired his arm and realized he was, perhaps, telling the truth.

She’d always known they were lying to her, but HYDRA had given her opportunities enough that it hadn’t put her off. Everyone had a limit, she supposed. This was hers: James Barnes, and his human understanding of mercy when none had ever been granted to him.

She was traveling when the abduction happened, but managed to get to a good wifi connection to watch the livestream as he made his gory, public escape. She downloaded an archived copy of the stream as soon as she could find one, and watched it slowly, intent, looking for a tell. 

Eventually she brought it to Zola. And so great was his delight at seeing his quarry, the target of his obsession, than he told her exactly what she wanted to know. 

“Yes,” the electronic voice gloated, “yes, I can see it in his eyes, the project was completed.”

“Which project?” she asked. 

“I am condensed down to a very small memory chip,” Zola said, delighted, “and I am in one of the spare inputs in his brain, and if you can see, look, his hesitation here—“ He called up the video and paged through frame-by-frame, freezing on one where Barnes’s body jerked before he freed himself from the chair— “I have been activated, and my program is running. I should have control of his motor neurons within a matter of weeks at most.”

“So you will become the Winter Soldier,” she said. 

“Yes,” Zola said, “and if I can get enough control of him, I can coerce him to build the transmitter I need to connect myself to the network. And then that copy of me can interface with this copy, and we can find all the other copies of me that exist.”

“Wow,” Regina said. “That’s pretty intense.”

“Oh yes,” Zola said. “I have never been one for doing things by halves. They would not let me do this before but after Insight he was to be decommissioned, and then they would have let me do as I wished.”

Regina absently tabbed forward in the video to the point where the injured Soldier propped his forehead against the stair railing and gasped, “Stevie, they already have me.”

“He knows,” she said.

“Probably,” Zola said, unconcerned. “But it is unlikely he will be able to tell anyone, let alone anyone who can help him.”

“I love you, Steve, and I’m sorry,” the Soldier said, looking straight into the camera, then past it, full mouth twisted in a grimace, eyes shadowed. She remembered those eyes so well. 

Regina had learned to control her expressions, more than well enough for the cameras of a simulated intelligence, and so she watched impassively. She could see for herself, when he tried to speak and was prevented. So Zola had that much control over him already. 

“Fascinating,” Regina said. “Absolutely fascinating.”

 

* * * 

 

Tony shuffled creakily into the lab, yawning. “No coffee,” he told himself firmly, out loud. “Just, I’m goin’ back to bed after this. Just gonna do this quick.”

“Sir,” Jarvis said, “shall I have one of the bots put a pot on for when you change your mind?”

“You’re all conspiring against me,” Tony said gloomily, rounding the corner and suddenly jumping three feet in the air with a yelp.

Barnes scrambled up from where he had been sitting on the floor behind the workbench. “Stark,” he said, “I did not mean to startle you.” 

Tony clutched at his chest, recovering some composure. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Barnes, what the hell are you even doing out of bed?”

Barnes was in pyjamas and a dressing gown and slippers, which were two items Tony had never before seen him bother with. He stood awkwardly, posture unfamiliar— but then, he’d just had a fairly traumatic surgery, it stood to reason he’d stand funny. “I just,” he said, fumbling, then gave Tony an oddly sly look and said, “It’s three-thirty in the morning, I could ask you the same.”

Tony blinked at him, then waved around. “My lab,” he said, then pointed at himself, “genius, sometimes I get ideas and I gotta test ‘em out before I can sleep.” He noticed then that the spot where Barnes had been sitting was surrounded by small components. Like Barnes had been building something. Something electronic. 

He crouched down on his heels. “What is this,” he asked. A transmitter, radio waves, like a remote flash trigger. Or a remote detonation trigger. A circuit board, a small simple one. “Barnes, I didn’t think you knew all that much about electronics.”

“I have studied a few things, here and there,” Barnes said. And it struck Tony then, how utterly unfamiliar Barnes’s voice was, too. He peered up at the man suspiciously, but there was no way this was an impostor. The missing arm was distinctive, and there weren’t a whole lot of ways to simulate that. 

It wasn’t the voice that was unfamiliar, Tony thought, so much as the speech. All the cadences were wrong. The accent was missing. And there was a faint hint of an utterly alien sibilance to the consonants that Tony couldn’t place, but that was absolutely not Bucky’s swallowed Brooklyn consonants or the Winter Soldier’s crisp diction. “Buddy,” Tony said, standing up with a frown. “You sleepwalking, or what?”

“I,” Barnes said uncertainly, “ah,” and he frowned. “Perhaps that is the case.” 

“Perhaps,” Tony said slowly. “Um, I’m gonna, um, go and work on the thing that woke me up. You can, um, feel free to keep doing what you’re doing but if that’s a remote detonator I gotta ask that you not blow anything up in here, there’s a specially-reinforced lab for testing explosives if you need but you gotta ask first. Okay?”

“Have no fear,” Barnes said, “I am not planning on detonating anything. I am only trying to teach myself a few basic things about circuitry so that I better know what suggestions I may make about the arm.”

Tony stared at him. “Seriously unreal,” he said, then waved his hand. “Go on, knock yourself out, let Jarvis know if you need anything.” He couldn’t make himself turn his back, so he nonchalantly sidled away sidelong until he was safely behind his own workbench. 

This wasn’t the secure lab, so there wouldn’t be any particular security protocols Barnes would have needed to overcome to get in. Tony sent Steve a quick email asking how long Bucky had been interested in electronic communications protocols. 

And as he set to work, sketching out the idea he’d had for a new servo design, he considered: how many times in his life had Bucky Barnes ever uttered the word ‘perhaps’?

 

* * * 

 

Sam closed the door and dropped his shoulder bag onto the kitchen table, sorting absently through his mail as he walked. Junk, junk, junk, bills, bills, he’d gone to paperless billing why did they still send him statements in the mail, stupid catalogues, somehow he’d gotten on a middle-aged white lady catalog list _ugh_. He dropped the whole mess on the counter and walked into the living room and jumped almost straight through the ceiling when Natasha, on the couch, sat up and said “Hey.”

“Jesus,” he said, clutching his chest; he’d landed off-balance and careened backwards into the doorframe, and grabbed at it to stay upright, “Jesus _Christ_ —“

“It’s nice to see you, too,” she said. 

“People usually fucking _knock_ ,” he said. 

“Mm,” she said. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a stylish t-shirt, flawless makeup, no indication of how she’d gotten into the house. Well, it was hardly a high-security facility. He’d probably just left the back door unlocked or something. Or, well, not— Natasha was hardly going to be deterred by conventional locks. “Well, I brought dinner.”

“Did you now,” he said, recovering. There wasn’t really any point at being upset with her for breaking in. She was hardly going to apologize for it. At least she hadn’t spied on him from the ceiling vents for days first. 

Well. That he knew of. His brain helpfully supplied a rapid-fire replay of the most embarrassing moments of his private life over the last couple of days. 

“Mm,” she said, “I read some reviews and this Indian place sounded really good, so I just got a bunch of stuff from there.”

“Star of India?” he said. 

“Yes,” she said. 

“I _love_ Star of India,” Sam said, and okay, yeah, the smell of that should probably have tipped him off. She had it sitting in the dining room still in the takeout bags, and it was still hot. In his defense, it was a heavy pollen day and his allergies weren’t exactly being nice to him. 

He got out plates and silverware, opened a bottle of wine because why not, and they sat at the table like civilized people. “Is everybody okay?” Sam asked. It had been kind of a wrench to leave Steve but he did still have a job down here and they did kind of need him back if he was coming back. 

“Nobody’s ever okay,” Natasha said. “But Clint’s pretty much healed up, at least. Steve is holding it together. Bucky’s, well, he’s a trooper.” She sighed, and started eating. 

“He really is,” Sam said. “You know, I hadn’t expected any of it but I really like the guy.”

“He likes you too,” Natasha said. “He’s real cute about it, he totally checks out your ass when he thinks nobody can see him do it.”

“No way,” Sam said, obscurely pleased. 

“Yes way,” Natasha said. 

“He’s gettin’ a lot of memories back,” Sam said. 

“He remembered, about him and Steve, how they used to be,” Natasha said, frowning at her wine glass. “I don’t know if— I don’t know if Steve’s told him he’s with you now, or what?”

“Oh,” Sam said, “I don’t know about that, but I know I told Steve it’s okay if he and Bucky wanna go back to that. I’m not the jealous type. I know there’s room in Steve’s heart for me, I ain’t worried about it.”

Natasha’s face cleared a little. “Good,” she said. “He’s— he’s adjusting so well to everything, I think—“ 

“I hope I don’t get my heart broke,” Sam said, “but I figure, it falls out how it falls out. There’s no clean way to deal with something as complicated as Barnes’s whole deal.”

“True,” Natasha said. They ate for a few moments, talking desultorily about the food, but Sam could tell Natasha was nerving herself up to say something. And she didn’t do tells like that, so she was letting him see that she was. “But listen, Sam,” she said finally, pushing her plate away, “I need you back up there. I really do.”

“I got a life,” Sam said, setting his wineglass down. “Natasha, I got a life. I can’t just— if Steve and I are gonna have any kind of chance at a relationship I can’t live in his pocket. I can’t be Bucky’s therapist. I can’t do that.”

“It’s not that,” she said, fidgeting with her wineglass— it wasn’t a nervous tell, for her, so she was probably doing it calculatedly, and that annoyed him. 

“It’s what’s going to wind up happening,” Sam said. “If I live in that Tower, I will never leave that Tower, and I will chain my mind to Bucky’s and break all of us, and I’ll wind up bitter and broken and hating Steve most of all. I’m just callin’ it now.”

“It’s not long-term,” she said. “At least I don’t think it is.”

“Even worse,” Sam said. “I gotta put my life down here back on hold— they’re not gonna hold my job again, not right after a leave— and drop everything and go back up there until they don’t need me?”

She bit her lip and went still as he spoke, which was closer to a genuine tell— there was nothing intro-level about reading Natasha’s body language, Sam was still getting used to that— and finally said, “I need you for a specific thing, though.”

He shook his head. “A weekend, I can do,” he said. “I can’t just run off.”

“I don’t know about your logistics,” she said. “I really don’t. I’m just saying, there’s a situation.”

“And it’s a situation somebody else has got to take care of,” Sam said. “What am I gonna do that you can’t?”

“I have to leave,” she said. “I have to go on a mission. I don’t know how long it will take me. It will be dangerous. No one else can do it. But there is information, and equipment, I absolutely need.”

“For what?” Sam asked. 

“Let me lay it all out,” she said, still looking at her wineglass. “I have reason to believe there is someone inside Barnes’s head that isn’t him.”

“Okay,” Sam said slowly. 

“I don’t know if it’s conditioning or implanted information or what, but something broke loose in his programming, either when they drugged him or just on its own,” Natasha said. “I have very good reason to believe that whatever it is sometimes is able to dominate his personality and make him do things he would not, otherwise. I also have very good reason to believe that he either isn’t aware of it, or doesn’t remember it most of the time— I would lay odds that whatever it is has access to his memories and is giving him selective amnesia. He seems to know something’s wrong sometimes, but doesn’t have enough control to overcome it.”

“Well,” Sam said, “shit. I don’t know how to handle that kind of thing.”

“I don’t either,” she said, “but I know who does, and I know how to find out. That’s the mission.”

“So what do you need me for?” Sam asked. 

“You’re one of the only people, I think,” Natasha said, “who’ll be able to tell when it’s Bucky and when it’s not, and more importantly, who’s going to be able to help Steve tell.”

“You sayin’ Steve won’t know Bucky from some stranger in his body,” Sam said skeptically. 

“I’m saying Steve doesn’t understand that it can happen,” Natasha said. "Steve isn't going to know what to look for."

“Couldn’t he come up with some kind of code word or something for Bucky?” Sam asked. 

Natasha stared at him. “Whoever else is in there probably knows everything Bucky does,” she said. “I haven’t told him I suspect anything. I can’t. I haven’t told Steve. If Steve knows, he’ll give the game away. Whatever this is, it’s extremely dangerous. You can’t just ask it to stop doing what it’s doing, or tell Bucky to fight it off. You can’t let on that you know it’s there until you’ve got it strapped down and are about to remove it. Even then, it’s better if you can get the drop on it.”

“You’re still keeping secrets from Steve,” Sam said, resigned. He poured himself another glass of wine. 

“I have to,” she said. “Sam, you’re not taking me seriously, again. This is Red Room programming. And I’m implicated in it, Sam. Bucky has false memories of me, knows things about me he can’t know— that means this thing knows them. And they match things I’ve found in my own subconscious.”

“And,” Sam said, blank. 

“Sam,” she said, exasperated, and he knew that was real and it gave him a twist of satisfaction low in his gut. He liked Natasha, he really did, and he respected her, but he almost never felt absolutely certain she wasn’t manipulating him. “Think about that. You know we haven’t found all of Bucky’s failsafes. It’s so incredibly likely that I’m one of them. If they gave us both sleeper programming about each other— what happened when he defected? He came to _me_ , not Steve, even though he shouldn’t have had any real idea who I was. He came to me, he let me bring him in, he has consistently come back to me. And I have similarly been drawn to him.”

“You couldn’t just, you know, have a crush on him because he was your childhood idol,” Sam suggested. He knew she had said that very thing herself. 

“I don’t work like that,” she said, scowling at him. 

“You could,” Sam said. “You’re human. And he could just have a crush on you because you’re a real pretty lady.” Which was true; Sam didn’t swing that way really, but he’d spent more than one guilty stolen moment in contemplation of her ass. She was _real_ damn pretty.

“Of course it’s plausible,” Natasha said, shaking her head. “That’s the whole point. Doesn’t it seem perfect? And unexceptional? We have so much in common and he fucks like a champion, of course that’s what it is! But Sam, it’s not.”

“You’re so sure of that,” Sam said. 

“Sam,” Natasha said. “I know doubting me is your favorite thing but this is important. He could hurt or kill Steve, and you know that’ll destroy both of them, so if you could possibly set aside your determination not to believe me about anything for just a moment?”

“Natasha,” Sam said, offended. 

“I have spent close to thirty years dealing with extensive mental conditioning,” she said. “I have missing memories, I have implanted memories that I know were false, I have gaps of missing time, I have reflexes I don’t understand, I have sleeper programming I don’t know about until it’s unexpectedly activated. These are all facts of life for me, and science fiction for you. So if you could spare a moment to listen to my hard-won personal experience, just for a moment, I would appreciate it greatly.”

She was emotionless, which was serious enough that Sam actually felt a little pang of guilt. Okay, so she wasn’t being dramatic about this. “Okay,” he said finally. 

“I am one hundred percent certain that there is something in Bucky that has been activated,” she said. “Either it’s just something psychological that you could explain with a textbook, or it’s something programmed in— and it could be an entire set of false memories with a different personality, I know for a fact they did that kind of thing, Sam— or maybe it’s something even worse that I can only imagine. But there’s someone there, looking out from behind his eyes, holding his jaw shut when he tries to speak sometimes, and I’m about ninety-nine percent sure that whatever it is can trigger seizures in him if he’s too close to breaking free. He’s still having those seizures, the doctors can’t explain them, and I am sure that’s what it is.”

“And you can’t just warn Steve,” Sam said. 

“I can’t,” she said. “This is not something Steve has any power against.”

“What the hell am I going to do about that?” Sam asked. 

“I just need you to protect Steve,” Natasha said. “I have to go myself. The programming— it’s the same things that were done to me, and I have to find the other survivors of the program, I have to find the facilities, I have to find the equipment. I have no choice in this, Sam.”

“I really can’t go up there,” Sam said. He’d burned his leave time, his vacation, everything he had. He had no days off from work for the forseeable future. He was going to have to work through holidays. He’d abused his entire department.

She sighed. “But you understand me, at least,” she said. 

“I do,” he said. “God damn it, Natasha, I’m going to lose my job.”

She nodded slowly, expressionless— distressed, Sam knew that was what that lack-of-expression meant. “I have Clint watching him,” she said. “He knows what to look for. He’s got experience, himself, but he also has spent the last few years watching me, and he’s caught me a couple of times when sleeper stuff got activated. He knows what to look for. I just don’t think he can do it alone.”

“I lose this job,” Sam said slowly, “my whole career’s pretty much gone. I gotta start over. I gotta sell this house. I gotta start from scratch.”

“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said. “I just, Clint has no backup. And Barnes is still the Winter Soldier.”

Sam contemplated his glass of wine grimly. “So,” he said, “you know what you’re askin’ is probably goin’ to doom any chance Steve and I have at actually makin’ a relationship _work_.”

She didn’t look up, and slowly nodded. “I do,” she said softly. 

Sam sighed. “Well,” he said, “so would Steve bein’ dead, so. I guess I got a lot of life-restructuring to do. You know my mom’ll kill me.”

“I don’t know much about mothers,” Natasha said, and it was probably calculated but it was the truth— she’d lost more than he’d ever have survived, and it was a little humbling. 

“Yeah okay,” Sam said, “I get it.” He sighed, and rubbed his face. “You wanna tell me what to look for?”

 

* * * 

 

Steve had an ability to wake up when he’d told himself to. By now, after a couple of panicked mornings where Bucky had been missing, he’d tuned his ears to catch Bucky waking up with nightmares in the middle of the night. So the noise that woke him was pretty quiet, but snapped him fully awake: Bucky’s feet hitting the floor, and stumbling unsteadily to the bathroom. Water running, and the hint of a quiet sound underneath— gagging, probably; Bucky often woke up nauseated from his nightmares. 

Steve pushed the covers back and sat up, rubbing his face. His chest hurt with how brave and quiet Bucky was being. Bucky had been working so hard for so long to be so good, and nothing was going his way, he was only getting hurt more, and the only choice he had was to take it, like he had been doing for the better part of a century now. Bucky was no more free than he had been as HYDRA’s gun; the only thing he had was that he was allowed to have a name and a memory.

Steve slipped out of bed and went and stood in his bedroom doorway. Bucky came out of the bathroom in a moment, drying his face on the hem of his shirt, standing still for a long moment and taking a few shaky breaths. He visibly dithered, torn between returning to his bedroom and going to the living room, and only after a long pause, swayed almost wistfully in the direction of bed, did he turn and make his way toward the living room, reluctant. 

Steve shifted his weight, and murmured, “Hey.”

Bucky startled, but not badly. “Steve,” he said. “Why are you awake?”

“Had a bad dream,” Steve lied. He stepped out into the hallway a little. “You too?”

Bucky hesitated. “Yeah,” he admitted finally, heartbreakingly subdued.

“I don’t know if it’d work for you but I don’t dream like that if I have somebody in my bed,” Steve said. He jerked his head back toward his room. “You wanna give it a shot?”

In the dark, Steve could see Bucky’s lower lip as he worried it between his teeth. “Yeah,” he said, tone rising a little at the end, uncertain.

“C’mere then,” Steve said, putting his hand carefully on Bucky’s shoulder, sliding it across to tug him in. Bucky came unsteadily in, and his exhaustion was obvious in every line of his body as Steve bundled him down into the bed. 

“You have bad dreams too?” Bucky asked. 

“All the time,” Steve said, and that was the truth. “A lot of them are of you falling.”

“Sorry,” Bucky said. Steve curled around him, tugging him close, pressing against him, shamelessly taking advantage. It felt so good to touch him, the solid almost-familiar planes of his body. 

“Right, ‘cuz you did it on purpose, you jerk,” Steve said, wrapping one arm under Bucky’s shoulders, and rubbing his other hand across Bucky’s belly. He tucked his face into the hollow of Bucky’s neck. 

A ticklish little laugh escaped as Bucky twitched, then relaxed into his grip. “Shut up,” he said. Steve snuffled at his neck and Bucky laughed again, twitching but not struggling. “Stop that.” Steve would have eased up, but from Bucky’s body language, he clearly wanted no such thing.

“I missed you,” Steve whispered. It was one in the morning and he was out of bravado. “I missed you so much, Bucky.”

“I didn’t know what it was that I missed so bad,” Bucky said, tipping his head so that his cheek rested against Steve’s forehead. 

“It was me,” Steve said, and laughed to show he was teasing. “You know it was.”

“It was,” Bucky said, not laughing, not teasing, raw and vulnerable. “Steve.” His voice shook a little. 

“Aw,” Steve said, “Buck—“ He moved and caught Bucky’s mouth with his, and Bucky went still, pliable, unresisting, tipping his head up, baring his throat and closing his eyes and _melting_ , there was no other way to describe it. 

Bucky tasted of mouthwash, powerful and astringent, but Steve licked his way past that and found the taste of Bucky’s tongue, familiar way down deep in the well of memory. He kissed Bucky for a long time, breathing his breath and tasting his skin and sliding his hand up under the front of Bucky’s shirt to press his palm against the center of his chest and feel his heartbeat, fast but steady and familiar, so familiar. 

“You feel like home to me,” Steve said finally, pulling back to nuzzle at Bucky’s cheek. It wasn’t even really sexual, all that much. “Like nothing has, since I woke up in this century. You feel like home.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, shaky. Steve was lying on Bucky’s left side, so the place where his arm was missing was pressed up against Steve’s chest, and it was Steve’s left hand that was pressed against Bucky’s breastbone. He moved his hand down and ran his palm across the planes of Bucky’s body, feeling the familiar shape of him, the proportions of his ribcage to his hipbones, the shapes of the planes of muscle that held him together. 

“They didn’t change you that much,” Steve said, tracing his fingers along the line of Bucky’s flank, down to where his hip flared a little. He was built so differently from Steve, had always been, both when Steve had been tiny and after his transformation. The things done to Bucky had only changed him subtly; he was a little bit bigger than he had been, bulkier and a couple of inches taller, but his fundamental shape was unchanged. 

“Not on the outside,” Bucky said quietly, anguished. 

Steve leaned over and kissed him gently, teasing into his mouth. Bucky finally put his hand in Steve’s hair, curling fingers around the back of Steve’s neck to pull him down and kiss him harder. 

“You came back to me,” Steve murmured, pressing his body against Bucky’s, his palm to Bucky’s chest to feel his heartbeat. “You came home to me.”

“I don’t know if enough of me’s left,” Bucky said, eyes closed, breathing hard. 

“You’re enough,” Steve said. “You’re enough— Bucky,” and he broke off and kissed him again. 

 

* * * 

 

Bucky had no clear memory of how he kept winding up in Steve’s bed, but he kept waking up with Steve’s arm wrapped around his waist, his body cradled in the curve of Steve’s. It felt good, it felt really good, and he let himself take shameless advantage of it a couple of nights running because he slept so well when it happened. But he felt strange about it, felt like maybe it was how fuzzy the drugs made him but there was just something sort of wrong in taking that kind of comfort.

More wrong in how often he lost time. None of his memories really hung together, when it came to current stuff, ongoing stuff. He kept waking up and finding that he was in places he had no memory of going. Sometimes people referenced conversations he didn’t remember. Some of it was surely the drugs, but there was something more, something that kept giving him burnt-out blank spaces in his memory. 

So he tapered himself off the painkillers, and spent a miserable day hunched on the end of the couch watching a playlist of his favorite videos on YouTube. (He had a rotation, of comfortable favorites judiciously spiced with new related favorites-to-be, and in that manner he’d managed to branch out pretty far. He’d only just begun exploring doom metal, which was at least mood-appropriate.) 

_I don’t know what it is to feel_  
 _There is no company, you crack down  
_ _There is no secret that I cannot keep._

He hadn’t seen Natasha in three days, and he had set a couple of little almost-traps to ascertain whether she’d come by— pieces of string in doorways, that kind of thing— and while he hurt too bad to check them now, he’d checked them recently enough to ascertain that she wasn’t checking in while he was asleep either, or watching from the air shafts.

It fucking figured. He knew what it was, he’d creeped her out with the Natalia thing. He didn’t know how he knew it, and he’d have dismissed it for nonsense except for her reaction, which had been to run away and not come back. 

It fucking figured, and he was miserable and maybe he was just punishing himself with the drug withdrawal, but it was what it was. He had no control over anything and his shoulder was almost healed but not enough to bear the new prosthetic and he was just fucking done with being useless and helpless and out of control.

But he couldn’t leave the Tower; couldn’t really leave the floor, couldn’t do anything, couldn’t go anywhere. He couldn’t sit on the couch anymore, he couldn’t stand it, but there was nowhere to go. 

He opened up a floor plan of the building and stared grimly at it, a little desperate. Finally he tapped a spot and said, “JARVIS… is this area off-limits?”

“No, Mr. Barnes, if you have clearance for this floor, you are allowed into that area as well,” JARVIS answered. 

“Good,” Bucky said, and closed the computer. 

 

* * * 

 

“Jesus,” Clint said, startling violently, and only managed to avoid plummeting to his death by a lightning-fast grab at the edge of the balcony railing. OK it wasn’t a railing so much as a support structure for the struts, and it wasn’t a balcony so much as it was kind of a buttress-thing, but Clint was no architect. 

“Shit,” Bucky said, and offered Clint a hand. Clint remembered just in time that the guy was still pretty beat-up, and waved him off. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s cool,” Clint said, swinging his leg awkwardly over a rail and hauling himself back into position. He’d come upon Bucky unexpectedly, and had reacted with far too much violence, but the man himself was part of the reason he’d come up here to think and it had been too much of a coincidence for Clint’s subconscious. “Nobody ever comes up here,” Clint offered by way of apology. “I hang out here because nobody ever comes up here.”

“Sorry,” Bucky said tightly. He yanked an earbud out of one of his ears and tucked it into the collar of his hoodie. He kind of looked like shit, dark circles under his eyes and pain engraved in the lines by his mouth and eyes.

Clint sighed, crossing his arms over his pulled-up knees. Best to just approach this head-on. “You okay?” he asked. 

Bucky looked at him, widened his eyes a little, then looked away. 

“Ah,” Clint said. “Yeah, same.” 

Bucky gave him a look, looked at his own missing arm, made a dubious face, then looked back over at him. “Doubt it,” he said. 

“That hurt?” Clint asked. 

“Like a motherfucker,” Bucky muttered. 

“Thought they’d found pain killers that worked on you finally,” Clint said. 

“Mm,” Bucky said, arching an eyebrow and looking away. 

“Bet they make you fuzzy,” Clint said. 

“Yup,” Bucky said. 

“I can see how you’re not nuts about that,” Clint said. 

“Nope,” Bucky answered. 

Clint sighed. “Don’t mean to be harshing your mellow up here,” he said. “I’ll find another place to sulk.”

“No,” Bucky said with difficulty, “no, don’t—“ 

Clint looked at him for a long moment. “Okay,” he said. They sat in silence for a moment before Bucky mustered enough the self-possession to look at him and give him a tight half-smile. Even then he couldn’t quite meet his eyes. 

After another moment Bucky picked up the dangling earbud and offered it to Clint, who laughed and took it. “Anything good?” he asked. 

Bucky dug the phone out of his pocket and showed Clint the screen. The White Stripes album _Elephant_ , track “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine.” Clint didn’t listen to a lot of music; when he did, he preferred thumping-bass stuff, for obvious reasons. And earbuds were no good for him, but this was obviously a truce so he’d be an idiot to refuse. 

He held the earbud gingerly against his ear, and Bucky looked at him quizzically. The music was tinny and hard to hear. 

_Is there a way to find the cure for this_  
 _Implanted in a pill?_  
 _Is it just the name upon the bottle  
_ _That determines if it will?_

Clint made a soft noise of amusement at Bucky’s expression. “I can’t wear earbuds,” he said, and dug his hearing aid out, showing it to Bucky. 

“Is that a radio?” Bucky asked. Surely he’d seen their mission headsets, and yes, it did bear a strong resemblance to it. 

“Hearing aid,” Clint said. Bucky tilted his head, looking intently at it, frowning. 

“Hearing,” Bucky said slowly, “aid.” Like he’d never heard of such a thing. 

Oh. Maybe he hadn’t. “I’m pretty deaf,” Clint said. “Lost most of my hearing a while back. Gotta wear these in both ears.”

Bucky looked from the hearing aid to his face. “Wait,” he said, “you can— if you can’t— can’t hear, that thing— makes it so you can?”

“Yeah,” Clint said. “Depends what’s wrong with your ears. In my case, the hearing aids mostly fix me, but sometimes I have bad days.” He shrugged, and stuck the hearing aid back into his ear, fitting it with practiced ease. 

Bucky was still staring at the tiny device, now mostly concealed in Clint’s ear. It was Stark tech, of course, and nearly invisible. Normally Clint wouldn’t have stood for the scrutiny but he let Bucky stare for another moment. 

“They didn’t,” Bucky said quietly, falteringly, “have those. When I. You know. Knew about things.”

“Yeah,” Clint said, and handed Bucky’s earbud back. “Who’d you know who coulda used one?” Nobody cared about stuff like that without a reason. 

Bucky fiddled with the headphones, stopped the music, put the phone back in his pocket. “Steve,” he said. 

“Steve was deaf?” Clint asked, blinking in disbelief. 

Bucky nodded. “One ear,” he said. “Well. Mostly. You had to stand on his left side in a crowd if you wanted him to talk to you. Otherwise he’d just sort of nod and smile.”

“Really,” Clint said. 

Bucky looked down, where his feet dangled over the very-distant streetscape. “Yeah,” he said. “I got real good at figuring out when he’d missed something and repeating it without it sounding like that’s what I was doing.” He grinned at the memory. “He hated havin’ it pointed out, you know?” 

“My right ear’s a lot better,” Clint said. “Even with both hearing aids in.”

Bucky nodded. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. He considered it. “Does it fuck you up in fights?”

Clint shrugged. “Not really?” he said. 

“Steve was always kinda… funny on the right side,” Bucky said. “Meant I was… I… I had to think about it. Fend people off from the bad side, or stand on the good side so I could talk to him? I thought about it a lot without realizing I was thinkin’ about it. He probably thought I was nuts.” He smiled again at that recollection, and looked over at Clint, who knew he hadn’t kept his expression clear from the way Bucky’s mouth slanted.

“I bet he didn’t think you were nuts,” Clint said gently. 

“I still do it,” Bucky said, realizing. “Oh my God, I still do it.” He shook his head at himself. “I still figure out which side of Steve to sit on in a group depending on what I think’s gonna happen.” He shook his head again. “It’s been 70 years, man. Seventy years since it mattered.”

Clint shook his own head. “No,” he said. “It still matters.” 

Bucky shot him a look. “You figure?” he asked, surprised. 

Clint nodded. “I figure,” he said. He pressed his elbow briefly against Bucky’s ribs. “You’re a good dude, you know that?”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Steve Rogers is my life’s work,” he said. Clint laughed. 

“Worse things to put on your resume,” Clint said. 

Bucky made a face that was nearly a smile, a noise that was kind of a laugh if you used your imagination. “Guess so,” he said. Silence stretched comfortably for a moment, and Clint watched Bucky watch the traffic seventy-five floors down. He couldn’t tell if there was someone else in there; so far, he looked clean, but it could be hard to tell. Natasha could be very unsettling sometimes, with her eerie sudden slides into a different personality. It was rare, but it had happened enough that Clint knew the warning signs.

He didn’t know Bucky well enough to know his tells, though. 

“I, um,” Bucky said after a little while, looking absently out at the city. “Have you, um. Did Natasha say anything to you about… going out of town, or, or something?” He grimaced at himself, still not looking at Clint, but glanced over at him after a moment. 

Clint shrugged. “She hasn’t,” he said uneasily, “exactly— I usually don’t know where she is. And I don’t. We have a deal. Where we don’t. Mention each other’s whereabouts.” He made an apologetic face. “So if I knew I couldn’t, you know? Tell you.” He figured acting like he felt bad about it would deflect any questions, just in case her suspicions were right. He was only good at lying when it involved misdirection. But he was _awesome_ at misdirection. 

Bucky nodded, looking down, and eventually made a grim face out at the cityscape. “I fucked up,” he said. 

“When would you even have had a chance to fuck up?” Clint asked. “You’ve been drugged out of your mind for what, two weeks now? Three?”

“I creeped her out,” Bucky said, staring fixedly down at the street. “I woke up and I was in the middle of, I dunno, a false memory or something, and I swore I knew her from somewhere else, and like, I knew all this stuff about her I shouldn’t have known, and I don’t know why I know it and I’m pretty sure it creeped her out real bad.”

“What kind of stuff?” Clint asked. 

“Her childhood nickname,” Bucky said. “And I… I just remembered, all these things about her, that I couldn’t know. I keep finding more memories, too— I know it was in Russia, I remember it was the version of my arm that had the hydraulic cable along the back so it was before 1990, she wore her hair long and in a braid.”

“She would’ve been a kid before 1990,” Clint said. 

“Exactly,” Bucky said. “So it’s creepy as fuck— I remember her as being probably 24, 25, I remember an incident where I was confused that Brezhnev was dead and she very tactfully told me about Gorbachev— I mean, those are pretty clear date indicators. And there’s no possible way, she’s just not that old. So obviously, I have her confused with someone else. And yet. Natalia. Ballet slippers. Nightmares about house fires.” He shook his head. “Red hair. Blue-green eyes. That little mole on her cheek. Her speech patterns, her dry humor. Sex stuff, how she likes it and what angle and that kind of real personal thing. There’s a lot of details like that. It’s not just someone who kind of looked like her, it’s _her_.”

“That’s fucked-up,” Clint said. 

“Someone,” Bucky said, “went to great lengths to fuck with me about this, but it doesn’t make sense because I was never going to know her. I was slated for termination not long after she defected.” He rubbed his face. “It doesn’t matter. It means I know things about her I shouldn’t. I have memories of her doing things she’s never done. And it’s creepy as fuck. And she’s avoiding me now.”

“I don’t think she’s avoiding you particularly,” Clint said carefully. 

Bucky flicked him a glance, for that— was he relieved? Maybe. “Hm,” Bucky said. “But it begs the question of why, exactly, I sought her out, and how much I really know about my own motivations.” 

“That’s rough,” Clint said, sympathetic. So Bucky knew, then. Sort of. Maybe. Natasha was probably right. 

“I thought I knew, though,” Bucky said. “I mean, I sought her out because I knew who she was. When I first got to New York, she’s the one I went to. I thought it was because I knew she’d gone through some of the same program that produced me, but— if I had all these implanted memories going around, then the suggestion was probably implanted too. So someone wanted me to go to her, not Steve, when I got loose. All through that process of bringing me in, she was my contact point.” He gestured, flicking his fingers outward vaguely. “And obviously, she had some conditioning pertaining to me. I’m not flattering myself that it was my native charm that won her over.”

“Might have been, though,” Clint put in. 

Bucky shook his head. “No way,” he said. “Someone wants the two of us to join up. That was someone’s end game. I’ve worked hard to overcome all the command words I know about, but— there may well be ones I don’t. The same could be true for her. Are they trying to get us together so they can take us both over? Are we supposed to be the Trojan Horse they can use to get into the Avengers?”

“I think Natasha’s got too much of her programming undone for that to work,” Clint said. 

“There’s always more,” Bucky said, rubbing his face. “There’s— there’s always more.” 

“Well,” Clint said. “You weren’t wrong. She’s probably the person in the world best-equipped to find it all.”

Bucky nodded, half to himself, then shot Clint a glance. “You’re close to her, yeah?”

“If anyone is,” Clint said, carefully neutral. He didn’t know if Bucky was the jealous type. 

“You’d, though, you’d know,” Bucky said awkwardly. “About the— how the programming— works.”

“I won’t say I’m an expert,” Clint said. “But I have a lot of personal experience with mind control and that kind of game.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “I have some idea what it looks like.”

Bucky nodded tightly. “If you—“ His jaw, then— Clint knew instantly what Natasha had meant when she’d said his jaw seemed to lock itself shut. “You’d know,” he said, and there was a flash of something desperate in his eyes, that died quickly. 

Clint made himself look confused. “I mean,” he said, “probably.” He shrugged. Bucky was looking down, now, and he reached out and carefully put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “Hey. It’s okay.” If Bucky tried to jump off of here there was no way Clint was going to be able to stop him. Fuck. 

Bucky nodded, half to himself, and then suddenly turned and punched the metal strut next to him. “God fucking _damn_ it,” he said, shaking his hand, and it was bleeding, “I am so fucking _tired_ of ff— being— _fucked with_.” 

“Buddy,” Clint said, grabbing his arm, “friend, I feel you on this, one hundred percent. Do not break that hand. Come with me.”

“I’m so fucking angry,” Bucky said, voice thin and unsteady, and he was shaking, staring distantly toward the horizon. “I’m so— I’m just _so angry_.”

Clint stood up, gently tugging Bucky to his feet. “It’s okay,” he said. “You are not wrong, buddy. I know where we need to go. Come with me. I will help you.” Bucky looked warily up at him, hesitating.  “Come on, Barnes. We’re gonna go shoot stuff.”

Bucky stared at his hand, and pushed himself up, not taking it— it would only pull on his healing bones, Clint realized. “Shoot stuff,” he said, and he was shaking with either fury or pain or both.

“Yeah,” Clint said. “Firing range here, same floor as the gym. I’ll spot you a handicap since you’re down an arm, but I bet you can still show me what you’re good at.”

“Supposed to distract me?” Bucky asked.

“Yeah,” Clint said. “I mean, what you went through was decades and for me it was just days, but at least I got an idea. And I know sometimes there ain’t shit you can do about it but if you can do something else at least you can survive. You can tell me to fuck off if you like, but I figure blowing giant holes in things is gonna do you more favors than breaking your knuckles on a railing that won’t ever give a fuck.”

“No,” Bucky said unsteadily, “you’re right,” and followed him down off the roof. 

 

* * * 

 

He rarely dreamed. He hallucinated sometimes, coming out of cryo, pushed out of lucid consciousness by how close it always brought him to death, by the otherworldly all-consuming agony of near-organ-failure, of his routine brush with complete systemic collapse, but those couldn’t be called dreams by any stretch of the imagination. 

He was almost never given time to sleep normally. If he fell asleep on a mission, which he only would if there was no target for him to keep watch on, the support staff would have to wake him. They had learned early on not to touch him— he didn’t remember the incident that had taught them, but it was somewhere in the shards of his past with all the other things that mixed themselves up in the near-death hallucinations. He was always so close to death, forever dealing it out, but forever denied its embrace for himself. And when the support staff had to wake him, it was like they tore him away from death, and he could not help but retaliate. (He never thought of it so clearly but there was a vague feeling that death was a gift, and he was more generous with others than they were with him.)

So they generally tended to poke him with sticks from a distance, or throw small objects or rocks, or make sudden loud noises. He tended to startle violently awake regardless, and he was always armed, so it never went well for anyone within reach.

The hand on his shoulder tore him out of a half-formed nightmare and he slashed blindly, frantically, with the knife he always had ready to hand. It caught his hapless waker in the neck— the man had been incautious enough to approach within arm’s length, to touch him— and the man staggered back, choking, hand falling away and going to his throat where the blood was coming—

“Sam,” he said in horror, coming awake, he must have dozed off, where had he gotten a knife _how had he gotten a knife_ — he threw it away like it burned him and grabbed Sam, who was choking, helpless, gushing—

“Sam,” he screamed, scrabbling at the terrible wound, trying in vain to hold the blood in, but it was too much blood, it was all of Sam’s blood, and Sam’s face went lax, faintly surprised, eyes going blank, it was too late, too late— too late— 

“No,” he sobbed, sick with horror, pressing futilely at Sam’s neck as if he could push the blood back in. “No, no, no— no— no—“

“Bucky,” the Man said, Pierce, and the whiplash-dislocation was like taking that first deep lungful of ice-cold PFC fluid— the Man had him by the arms, and his voice was resonant and close. “Bucky, it’s all right, calm down.”

“No,” he sobbed, and there was blood everywhere, and the Man was holding his arms— no, his left arm was deactivated, they had shut it off, they were shutting him down, the darts, paralyzing him, the _needle_. No. “No— I didn’t— I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to— I killed him— I killed him— I didn’t, I didn’t— why did I have a knife? Who gave me a knife? Why did they give me a knife?”

“Bucky,” Steve said, pained, urgent, “Bucky, stop— it’s okay, Bucky, nobody’s dead, it’s okay.”

“I fucking know what fucking death looks like,” he sobbed, helpless, hopeless, gutted. “He’s fucking dead, I fucking killed him—“ He wasn’t theirs anymore, he’d escaped, he was here, with Steve, he was free, and he’d killed Sam, who was kind, who helped him, he wasn’t armed here, he shouldn’t have had a knife. “Why did you give me a knife? Why did I have a knife?”

“I didn’t,” the Man said, “I didn’t, it’s— Bucky, you didn’t— he’s not here!” Pierce never got upset like that; he got angry, got emphatic, but never seemed upset, never shed tears like now, and it was frightening and disorienting and he knew that he was letting it agitate him too much, they’d shut him down, they’d shut his arm down and paralyze him and shut him in the tank and freeze him and he didn’t want it, he didn’t want it. 

“No,” he said, “I don’t want it, don’t freeze me, no, I’ll— I didn’t mean to,” and he scrabbled wildly with his blood-covered hands— hand— he only had one hand— his left arm was shut down— 

“Bucky,” the Man said, pleading, it wasn’t like him at all, “Bucky, please, it’s all right, calm down.”

Zola chuckled, wicked and intimate in his ear. “And you see,” he said, “we do not take them away from you now, in this new world. We make you take them away from yourself. Who do you wish to lose next?”

“Don’t take anyone else away,” he said, wild with terror, “don’t take them away from me— don’t make me do this— don’t—“

“Will you beg me?” Zola asked. 

“Nobody’s making you do anything,” the Man said, and that was more like himself, more condescending, his benevolent rationality in the face of those he had undone with his commands but never with his own hands, never; his hands were so clean, so white, he had never had blood under his nails. 

He clamped his jaw shut. He wasn’t going to beg anyone. He had no pride, he had no dignity, but more, he had no right, no self to use as a center to beg from. He had nothing but his ability to fight, and they used that against him. 

But the panic was beating in his chest. “No,” he said, shuddering, trying to pull away from the Man’s grasp. “No.” 

“Bucky,” Pierce said, and the syllables were meaningless. 

“You have no capacity to resist anymore,” Zola said, unbearably pleased. “I’ve nearly completed the work on the device to re-connect myself to the network, and even without it, I’ve nearly completed the programming to take you over entirely. I don’t have to erase you anymore, Sergeant Barnes, I can simply ignore you. Soon I won’t have to struggle with you anymore. And won’t it be better? If you can’t control yourself, if you only hurt the ones who try to help you, you might as well just cede control willingly.”

“I won’t,” he said. “I won’t. Not to you.” 

“Nobody’s making you do anything,” the Man repeated. “Nobody’s going to.”

“Give up,” Zola said, reasonable. “Just give up. Let me take control. It will be so much simpler.”

“No,” he said, and thrashed free of Pierce, scrabbling desperately to escape. 

“Bucky,” Pierce said, “Bucky! Stop!”

Pierce was strong, stronger than he should be, and they should have drugged him by now. Without his left arm he wasn’t strong enough to get away, and Pierce wrestled him down and lay on him, holding him down, holding him immobilized. 

The fight went out of him and he began to cry. “No,” he sobbed. “No.” No one would come for him. No one would stop them. They would do what they would, make him into what they wanted, and he would have to live with it, eternally denied the release of death. 

No. He had to fight. He had to fight them. He had to keep fighting them. For Sam. It was too late, but it had to end now.

— 

Sam picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he said groggily. 

“Sam,” Steve said, voice thick, “I’m so sorry, I know what time it is, I’m so sorry,” and there was an awful noise in the background that made him really hard to understand. 

“Yeah it’s four in the mornin’,” Sam said, “what the hell is goin’ on?”

“Bucky,” Steve said, but couldn’t continue, and the noise-- a thumping and kind of moaning noise-- got louder. 

“Is he hurt?” Sam sat up. Shit had to be pretty bad for Steve to call him. Fuck, he’d sort of thought Natasha was exaggerating the danger.

“He’s--” Steve said, and there was a clunk, and Steve’s voice went distant. “Bucky! Bucky. He’s not dead. He’s on the phone. Listen to me!”

“No,” Bucky said, hoarse, audibly distraught, “no, no-- no--”

There was a scrabbling sound and Steve said breathlessly, “Sam, he hallucinated that he killed you and I can’t-- I can’t convince him otherwise.”

“He’s fucking dead,” Bucky said, “don’t fucking pretend-- I loved him and you made me kill him, that’s what you do, that’s what you did with Steve and it’s what you did with Natalia.”

“I’m not dead,” Steve protested. “Buck! I’m not dead. Hey! Look at me! I’m not--”

Bucky was sobbing audibly now. “Why do you do this,” he pleaded. “Why do you do this. I know you’re not him. He wouldn’t make me do this.” 

“It’s me,” Steve said. “Bucky, it’s me, it’s really me. Natasha’s okay and Sam’s okay and I’m okay. It wasn’t real.”

“Stop it,” Bucky said, thin and desperate, “stop it, I won’t— I won’t— I’m not gonna let you— you can’t— you _can’t_.”

“Dude,” Sam said, “I’m two hundred miles away, I can’t fix this. And you know what, even if I was there, I don’t think I could fix this. You need medication and doctors for this kind of thing.”

“Natasha didn’t pick up,” Steve said. He was audibly out of breath. “Fuck. I don’t—“

“He’s gonna hurt himself,” Sam said, “or you.” He sat up. Fuck. _Fuck_. What the hell could he do? 

“I’ve got him pinned down,” Steve said. “I’m stronger than he is when he doesn’t have the arm. Just barely.” There was a fumbling noise. “I’ve got you on speaker. It’s the only thing I could think of. Sam’s on the phone, Bucky, he’s not dead.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “I dunno how convincing I can be on the phone at four in the mornin’. Bucky, you could time this shit better.”

“Stop,” Bucky said, his voice thin and unsteady. “Just— stop. No.”

“Bucky, I don’t know what else to do,” Steve said. “It’s me, and that’s Sam on the phone, and neither of us is dead. They thought I was dead, but I was just stuck in ice. Sam never died at all.”

“You’re not Steve,” Bucky said, “and that’s not Sam, and I’m done fuckin’ pretending.”

“Wait, wait,” Sam said. “Catch me up. I get that you don’t find a voice on the phone all that convincing, that’s a pretty poor effort compared to the production values they usually got in this joint I’m guessin’, but if the enormous dude who’s got you in a sleeper hold isn’t Steve then who the hell is he? Because if you know more than one super-soldier I wanna know what kinda bars you been goin’ to.”

“Jesus,” Steve said quietly, but the laugh was about half-bitter and half-startled, so Sam figured it was an improvement. 

“He’s not Steve,” Bucky said. “He’s not fucking _Steve_.”

“Looks like him, though,” Sam said, pursuing a suspicion. 

“They always do,” Bucky said, and he was calmer, but it was a dull sort of resigned calm, not genuine peace. 

“Smells like him, though?” Sam asked. He knew both Sam and Bucky had uncanny senses of smell, he’d cooked for them enough to know that. He didn’t even have to start cooking; he could just take ingredients out of the fridge and Steve would turn up, perky and interested and dog-like in his desire to Help.

Bucky didn’t have a ready answer for that. “Yeah,” he said finally, disconcerted. 

“You can’t really fake that,” Sam said. “I mean, how would they know?”

“He’s dead,” Bucky said. “I, they made me kill him.”

“No you didn’t,” Steve said. “They tried, but you didn’t do it.”

“Shh, shh,” Sam said, “let him work it out if he’s gonna.” 

“I never knew,” Bucky said, “if he smelled different after the serum or if it was that I could smell him differently.”

“I always wondered that about you,” Steve said, shaky and quiet. “God, Bucky, I always— I wondered.”

“Bucky,” Sam said gently, “I don’t know how they’re still messin’ with you, but _they_ are, not us. I’m alive and Steve’s alive and whoever’s tellin’ you otherwise is the one who’s lying.”

Bucky made a muffled noise, a sob. “They’re gonna take me back,” he said in a thick strangled voice. “They’re— they’re trying to—“ He made an inarticulate noise that faded off into something like a whimper. 

“I won’t let them,” Steve said. “I got you, Buck. I got you.”

“Baby don’t worry,” Sam said, and the cadence of the words was familiar and he realized he was quoting Bob Marley. “About a thing. You call me at four in the morning you listen to me singin’ all awful,” and he raised his sleep-cracked voice to sing, “ _‘Cause every little thing’s, gonna be all right!  
Baby, don’t worry, about a thing_ —“

“Oh God,” Steve said, laughing tiredly. 

“ _Rise up this morning, smile with the rising sun,  
_ _Three little birds, perch by my doorstep  
_ _Singin’ a sweet song  
_ _A melody pure and true;  
_ _Singin’, this is my message to you-oo-oo._ ” 

Sam’s singing voice was all right but not at four in the morning. Still, the tune was recognizable at least, and in a moment he heard Bucky laugh too. “Jesus,” Bucky said, “Sam, I—“

“ _Don’t worry_ ,” Sam continued obstinately, “ _about a thing.  
_ _Cause every little thing’s, gonna be all right_.”

“Hey,” Steve was saying, and there was rustling, and Bucky was crying, but quietly. “Hey. It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re getting better, I promise. It’s okay, Bucky.” 

“How do I know what’s real?” Bucky asked, muffled, heartbreakingly agonized. 

“It’s okay,” Steve murmured. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

It took a while before Steve, apologizing profusely, made Sam hang up, and there was no way Sam was going to get back to sleep after that. 

He rolled onto his back. God damn it. It was a four-hour drive to get up there, and he was out of leave time, vacation time, sick days, anything. But Natasha was right. And he’d looked into the leave policies, he’d applied for the transfer and been denied, he had chased down his options, and he was out of them. He was just gonna have to jump.

He had to call his mom.

But not at four in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. Ok. Thanks for the break. (Sorry about that! If you didn't see, I posted a little [gapfiller prequel thing here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2507318?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_17608346) last week to make up for missing this.)  
> It just took a little longer for this chapter to come together. And the next one's gonna be tricky too, and I'm traveling out of town this weekend/part of next week, so we'll see. But if I don't get it up, I have a couple more one-offs up my sleeve instead, and they're probably porn, so, it's not really an unmitigated tragedy, right?  
> THANK YOU to everyone still reading, and especially those commenting and so forth. Say hi [on Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bomberqueen17)! I'm real bad at answering but I make stupid noises and wriggle around in my seat and someday I will become a good correspondent person.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Black Widow program experiences a kind of revival (heh), Clint crosses out multiple items from his bucket list, Tony and Steve both are apparently a little punchy, Bucky drinks the entire goddamn pot of coffee, homoeroticism fights Nazis on two fronts, and we get closer to a resolution. Maybe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man sorry this update is so late. I had been doing so well! Lucky 13 chapter, I guess. 
> 
> Warnings? Eh. More horror at Bucky's situation, mostly. And lesbians! That's not a warning, that's so you have time to get psyched. I have not written femmeslash in waaaaaaayyyyy too long. 
> 
> I guess there's a warning for sort-of noncon making out? The kiss-ee catches on pretty quick to what the kiss-er is up to, though, so no real harm done.  
> * * *

“Such a busy little spider,” a familiar voice said in Russian. 

Natasha let herself smile. “I have been that,” she said, without turning. She hadn’t known whether the invitation would be answered. She hadn’t been completely sure there was still anyone to answer it. She fidgeted with her wineglass, turning it by the stem and watching the liquid leave thin trails on the walls of the glass as she tipped it. “I am sure you have not been idle either.”

“We spiders tend not to be,” Yelena said, and sat across from her at the table. “But you. You caught the Winter Soldier.” She raised both eyebrows.

“I brought him in,” Natasha said, “but I would not say I caught him. He came to me.”

“I suppose he had discovered you were an expert in your field,” Yelena said, and now it was just one eyebrow she had raised. 

“This is much longer than I had expected it would take you to make a dig at me for changing sides,” Natasha said. 

“You weren’t wrong,” Yelena said, and for the first time, she looked other than flawless. She looked tired, for a moment. “I could not do what you have done, but it was the right thing, for you.”

Natasha blinked, letting her surprise show. “Surely,” she said, “you don’t mean that.”

“I do,” Yelena said, and the flash of honesty disappeared as she sat back in her chair. 

“Wine?” Natasha asked, gesturing at the other glass. Yelena gave her a considering look. 

“Yes, thank you,” she said. It was trusting of her, to take a drink from an open bottle like that, but Natasha poured into her own glass as well. The empty glass could be poisoned, certainly. Yelena just didn’t think she had any motivation to do it. 

Because she didn’t. 

But it was still an important gesture, and combined with the fact that Yelena was even here, it gave Natasha a lot of hope. Maybe Yelena wasn’t even lying about how she felt about Natasha’s defection.

“Health,” Natasha said, and they tapped their glasses together and drank. 

“You are here with questions about the Winter Soldier’s programming, I assume,” Yelena said, setting her glass down. She had truly taken a drink of the wine, Natasha rather thought. 

“Yes,” Natasha said. “Do you remember him?”

“I do,” Yelena said. 

“Did you ever work with him?” Natasha asked. 

“I did,” Yelena said. “Not more than a couple of times. The exercise when we were still girls, another a few years later where I barely saw him, and one final time, when I kept having to check that he was still breathing. They did some pretty clumsy programming on him, towards the end, I don’t even think he could speak.” She regarded her wineglass, swirling the liquid in it. “Obviously, from his actions after he broke with his handlers, that programming has undone itself. He can clearly speak now.”

“Yes,” Natasha said, “he does seem to have deprogrammed himself, to an extent.”

“But not entirely,” Yelena said, flicking her gaze up to catch Natasha’s. “You’ve come because he’s stuck. Or you are.”

“Yes,” Natasha said. “What is left of the old program? Is there any of the equipment left, and what of the technicians? Anyone who still knows how to run them?”

Yelena watched the wine leave streaks on the walls of her glass as she tilted it. “The information exists,” she said. “Much of the equipment, I have kept tabs on and can locate easily. Whether it is in working order I could not say. And of those who can run it, well.” She gave Natasha a wry smile. “None of them belong to me with any certainty.”

It was more honesty than was Yelena’s wont, but Natasha had not yet heard enough to analyze Yelena’s interest, to determine what her motivation, if any, would be for lying. And it would be in Yelena’s best interests to control that equipment. There were only a few of them in the world augmented enough to withstand it. Natasha, Bucky, and Yelena were most of the target group.

Oh, maybe Steve could. It didn’t bear considering, what that would do to him.

“I need a full set of the equipment,” Natasha said. “And someone who knows how it works.”

“I may know someone, but may not be able to control them,” Yelena said. “And while I said I could locate it, that does not mean I could lay hands on it.”

Natasha sipped from her glass, rolling the wine around in her mouth. It was Italian wine, and she quite liked it, and if she had the budget she’d order some to be delivered to one of her safehouses. But she didn’t; she’d have to see if Pepper could be persuaded to buy some instead. That was the kind of manipulation Pepper enjoyed. If she had time she’d soak the label off and mail it to Pepper with no return address, maybe with an outlandishly explicit love note in French to drive Tony crazy with paranoia. His French was terrible and his handwriting recognition algorithm had nothing on Natasha’s forgery skills. Pepper needed no such thing to decipher who would be sending her wine labels postmarked from obscure Russian backwaters; there was no call for high-tech counter-espionage when you had simple common sense.

“The question is, of course,” Natasha said, “whether I could lay hands on it, if you told me where it was.”

Yelena laughed, at that, a full-throated and apparently genuine laugh. “Naturally,” she said. “That is the question. And I think, perhaps you could, but it would not be in working order anymore. However, if you could persuade me to join you, then we might be able to obtain it intact.”

Natasha sat forward. “Let us discuss the logistics,” she said, “and then I will decide whether I wish to persuade you to join me.”

Yelena’s grin broadened. “Do you think you could locate a technician?” she asked. 

“I am certain that will be the least of my worries,” Natasha said. Yelena gave her an eloquently skeptical look, and Natasha gestured with her wineglass. “Please, Yelena. James Barnes basically recited HYDRA’s personnel database from memory, and has proven staggeringly accurate. They thought they were erasing his memories, all that time, when it turns out they were merely interrupting them. He remembers an astonishing amount. I am positive he can tell me where to find someone who knows how to operate the equipment.”

“This equipment in particular, though,” Yelena said, still dubious. 

Natasha set the glass down. She did not have the patience she once had, for endless circling around, so she gathered herself instead, and when she had the words, she said, “You remember the, the dream facility, yes?”

“Yes,” Yelena said, and Natasha closed her eyes for a second. 

“Where they gave us new skills,” she said, “and taught us. It wasn’t a real dream.”

“No,” Yelena said. “I had— I was not certain, either, but I found, when I located the equipment I found more information. The place that had the pool, and the locker room where you found your mission equipment?”

“Yes,” Natasha said quietly. “Yes, I remember.”

“And there were people there who were sometimes real people and sometimes not,” Yelena said. “You and I, we trained together in there sometimes.”

Natasha looked at her. “Was that real?” she asked. 

“Not all of the times,” Yelena answered, gaze fixed on her glass. “I, I think most of the time you were really there when I was, but there was— at least one time, you weren’t. They—“ She blinked. “They made me kill you, but it wasn’t really you or you’d really be dead.” She glanced up. “That’s how it worked, right?”

“Yes,” Natasha said. “That’s how it worked. You died for real, if you were killed. If they made you kill me—“

“You had defected,” Yelena said. “I think.” She was speaking quietly. 

Natasha was normally not the sort to waste time on guilt. But living with Steve had made her soft. “I would have taken you with me,” she said, low and fierce, “if I’d had anywhere to go. But since I could not—“

“They did not torture me over you very much,” Yelena said almost wearily, with a flick of her fingers. “You were convincing. Even _I_ thought you hated me.”

“Yelena,” Natasha said hollowly, but there was no point to protesting. 

“Love is for children,” Yelena said, “and friendship for fools, and personal loyalty sets you up to betray your cause.” She shrugged, and drained the wine glass, then set it down firmly but carefully on the table. “However. I promised myself in the darkest depths of my despair after you defected that the next time I saw you, Natalia Romanova, I was going to…” 

Natasha raised first one eyebrow, then both. “Well?” she said finally. 

“I had not made up my mind,” Yelena said. “Either I was going to kill you or I was going to fuck you.”

Natasha let herself smile, and leaned over to pour more wine into Yelena’s glass. “I know which I would prefer,” she said. 

Yelena’s smile was often more like a smirk, a sweet and smug deliciously crooked curve, and she deployed it now. They had not been lovers in many years, but it was one of Natasha’s few little gems of memory. They had not taken the memories, had not tampered with them, because they had simply never suspected their extent, Natasha rather thought. Most of the people running the program had been men, and they hadn’t understood the relationships between women. They had never suspected that the two girls had gotten up to anything more than occasional huddling for warmth.

Not that they had often. But when they had… 

“I think I already had guessed which you would prefer,” Yelena said, amused. “Because if it were the other, this wine would have killed me by now.”

Natasha tilted her glass at her in a wordless toast, drained it, and refilled it. “I have not yet grown soft in my old age, exactly,” she said, “but I _have_ become increasingly fond of orgasms.”

“I am told a woman’s sexual capacity reaches its peak as she passes thirty,” Yelena said. “But I have not had much chance to determine that, for myself.”

“Since I defected I have not slept with anyone for any reason but to please myself,” Natasha said, suddenly serious. 

Yelena tilted her head, wrinkling her nose in a charmingly analytical expression. “Men or women?” she asked. 

“It has mostly been men,” Natasha said. “I know more men, I meet more men, more men are interested in women than women are, and it is a lot easier for me to gain the trust of men.”

Yelena shook her head slightly, sighing. “I have mostly had men but in general they do not please me,” she said. “But I have not had such freedom to choose as you seem to have.” She gave Natasha another dubious look. 

Natasha slowly, deliberately licked her lower lip. “Let me persuade you to help me,” she said. “I think we would both enjoy the effort. And then you could meet your goal, and I mine, with no conflict.”

“Well,” Yelena said, turning her glass thoughtfully. “I _am_ nearing thirty. It would be a worthy experiment.”

“I’ve a room,” Natasha said.

Yelena looked her up and down. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t,” she said. She held up the wine bottle. “Shall we finish this and go? We have catching up to do.”

“Yes,” Natasha said, and held out her glass. 

 

 

* * * 

 

Lakeisha scrolled tiredly through the management interface for Barnes’s social media accounts. He had backslid so badly since the abduction, more than could be accounted for by his various surgeries. The heartbreak got kind of numbing after a while; the upshot, which was all Lakeisha had time to worry about at the moment, was that he really couldn’t manage his own social media profiles. She sat with him sometimes and they put together responses to things he felt he had to respond to, and she helped him make updates that conveyed things he wanted to communicate, but… 

He was almost a different person. Sometimes he was nearly mute. Sometimes he was coolly dismissive. Sometimes he was almost contemptuous. Sometimes he stared at her like he was pleading for something, but she could never figure out what it was he wanted. 

There was a weird message that kept recurring, from numerous different accounts. It kept saying some variation of “I was working on very incomplete information, but so were you.” Lakeisha pondered it for a while, finding no less than six iterations as she took care of the various accounts, and finally called up the directory and called security. 

Security was monitoring all communications directed at Bucky, looking to see if any HYDRA contacts tried to initiate anything. Turned out they’d flagged that message as well, and Lakeisha found herself passed rapidly up the command chain until she was talking to a woman she knew had formerly been pretty important at SHIELD. 

“We should meet in person,” Maria Hill said. “Come to my office.”

“Do you think it’s someone who knows anything?” Lakeisha asked, about ten minutes later. She was working pretty hard at not being intimidated; she was in jeans and a rhinestone-studded t-shirt and big hoop earrings because all her decent professional stuff to be in the background of news shots was at the dry cleaner’s. She didn’t have the wardrobe for this job yet and she knew she looked like a hood-rat teenage mom today. To her credit, though, Hill didn’t even seem to have noticed, in her sleek pantsuit and immaculate makeup; she was all business. 

“It’s not a spammer,” Hill said, “and it’s been through some pretty high-level redirection to conceal that they’re all coming from the same general geographic area. Someone physically located in Virginia or thereabouts.”

“Could be a wacko,” Lakeisha said. 

“There are plenty of wackos in here,” Hill said. “This doesn’t strike me as one.” She frowned at the screen, tapping her fingers on the glossy surface of her desk. 

Lakeisha shrugged, trying hard not to fidget. “Guess we could ask him,” she offered finally. 

Hill glanced up at her, and her expression went a little soft— concerned? “How is he?”

“Awful,” Lakeisha said. “It’s like he’s someone else entirely. He’s pretty much completely fallen apart.”

Hill’s face twisted and she looked down and away. “Poor bastard,” she said. “If there’s ever a guy who deserved to catch a fuckin’ break—“

“Yeah,” Lakeisha said, shaking her head. “He was doin’ so good, too.”

Hill was staring fiercely at the screen, lost in thought. “I’m going to run this down,” she said. “Find this person. I’m gonna operate on the assumption that it is someone HYDRA-related who knows something, and if it turns out to be just a wacko or a spammer, well, it’d do my soul good to put the fear of God into some loser.”

Lakeisha watched her face, taking in the flash of emotion that went across it. “I’m mad too,” she said, finally parsing the sick twisting feeling in her gut. “I’m so fuckin’ mad at what they did to this guy.”

Hill nodded slowly. “I’m fucking furious,” she said. “I mean, all the time; my life’s work was for nothing too, it’s all part of that. He’s just the obvious sign of it.” She grinned. “It’s good to have a target.”

 

* * * 

 

 

Natasha unlocked her room with a keycard, and Yelena stood a half-pace back, close enough that her body heat was palpable. “I had expected a luxury suite,” Yelena said as the door opened and revealed an unexceptional hotel room. “Didn’t defection bring you American riches?”

Natasha laughed, and went in first, pulling out her phone and immediately scanning for bugs and cameras. “No,” she answered simply. 

“You haven’t already checked it?” Yelena asked. 

“I have,” Natasha said, “but you know fine well that’s no good if you’ve left it unattended. Which I have.” She registered a blip, probably a false positive, and pulled carefully at the lightswitch plate near the bed. It didn’t move, so she pulled out a small screwdriver and removed it, checking the back of it. There was nothing there, so she scanned it twice and then replaced it. She’d already checked all the switchplates when she’d first checked in, but it didn’t hurt to be cautious. “There’s an aperitif in the refrigerator, if you’d care to check and see it’s still sealed. If it is, I’d like some.”

Yelena went to the fridge and scanned it with a gadget that looked fairly similar to SHIELD issue. “Nobody’s touched the fridge since…” She did something, and the gadget beeped. “Last prints are yours.”

“I left them unwiped,” Natasha said, “so, good.” That meant no one else had touched and wiped it since. 

The bottle was similarly un-tampered with, and Yelena poured them each some of the liqueur in the tumblers the hotel provided. Yelena sat on the bed, against the headboard, kicking her shoes off— kitten heels, a sign she’d dressed to superficially impress but hadn’t come to really turn it up; that required stilettos. “So tell me about the Avengers,” Yelena said. 

Natasha sat on the edge of the bed. “What do you really want to know?” she asked. 

Yelena shook her hair back, grinning crookedly. “Is Captain America as ridiculous as he looks?”

“I live next door to him,” Natasha said. “I have spent the last two years trying to get him a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, because otherwise I will not be able to keep myself from tearing his clothes off with my teeth.”

“He looks pretty,” Yelena conceded, “but he can’t— surely he’d be a terrible lover. Men like that are never any good in bed.”

“He’s not like that,” Natasha said. “He’s earnest and awkward and sweet but he’s also clever, sarcastic, and very quick on the uptake. He’s rather sexually inexperienced, I think, but he’s certainly bisexual and I have reason to believe he’s quite generous in bed. He’s just young, Yelena. He’s so young.”

“Really,” Yelena said. She looked interested. “Do you fancy him, then?”

“He has the body of a Greek statue,” Natasha said, “and when he blushes, it goes all the way down his neck. He wanders around the house sometimes in cutoff sweatpants and no shirt. His sense of humor is even more deadpan than mine and half as corny.”

“So you find him attractive,” Yelena said. “Would you really sleep with him?”

“No,” Natasha said, “but really only because I worked so hard to find him a boyfriend that it would be hypocritical of me. But I admit, I have thought about him and Bucky together. You know they were lovers when they were teenagers.”

“Really,” Yelena said. 

“Yes,” Natasha said. “And I _have_ slept with Barnes. He’s a very, _very_ good lover. If Steve’s been with him he’ll certainly have taught him some tricks.”

“You’ve slept with the Winter Soldier,” Yelena said, regarding her over the edge of her glass.

“I have,” Natasha said. She slowly let her mouth curve into a satisfied smirk. “It was phenomenal, Yelena.”

“The metal arm?” Yelena asked, leaning forward a little eagerly.

Natasha shook her head. “No,” she said, “it was damaged, we’ve taken it off him now. But just with one hand and his mouth— Yelena, I don’t think anyone’s ever gone down on me like that before in my life.”

“Not even me?” Yelena raised both eyebrows, looking offended. 

“Not even you,” Natasha said. 

“Ohh,” Yelena said, nearly a growl, and set her glass down on the bedside table. “I will not be bested in this by a man.”

Natasha laughed and just barely had time to set her glass down before Yelena playfully wrestled her down into the bed. “Yelena,” she laughed, “you have always been so arrogant. You think to make this a contest?”

“Competition makes anything more fun,” Yelena said, shoving a thigh between Natasha’s and grabbing the back of her neck to slide their mouths together. 

Kissing Yelena was strange, at first— it was a long time since Natasha had been with a woman, and Yelena’s face was so perfectly smooth, her lips so soft, her body so slender and her hands so small. But memory came back, a rush of familiarity, and Natasha opened her mouth and pulled Yelena down to her, pulse kicking up and blood rushing hot in excitement. 

Even without perfume— because of course no spy would wear perfume— her scent was intoxicating, a soft sweet tang, and Natasha eventually rolled them over, and let herself put her face down between Yelena’s breasts and just breathe. “I missed the smell of you, you know,” she confessed. 

“Is that all?” Yelena asked, amused. Her self-possession was perfectly intact so far— her discipline was not quite as good as Natasha’s, but she had survived the program, so it was obviously quite good. But her lips were red and a little swollen, the color high in her cheeks, and her coy smirk was a little brighter than before. 

“Of course not,” Natasha said, “I missed your breasts,” and she slid her hand up under Yelena’s back, between her spine and the mattress, and unhooked her bra. 

“I think they are bigger now,” Yelena said. “I was such a young thing when you left.”

“They were perfect,” Natasha said, sliding her hand up under the unfastened brassiere. And yes, they were bigger now, a bit, softer, but still small and pert. “They are still perfect.”

“Flatterer,” Yelena said, but arched her back, pressing into Natasha’s hand as she caught a nipple between two fingers and pressed gently into the soft flesh, kneading as she took Yelena’s mouth again. 

“I am meant to be persuading you,” Natasha reminded her, pushing her shirt up, and the bra with it. “Remember? I need your help to get the equipment we were programmed with.”

“Mmm,” Yelena murmured, not breaking the kiss, and snaked a hand around under Natasha’s shirt to unfasten her bra. “Yes. I think I do not need to be persuaded after all but you are welcome to keep trying. Meanwhile I must avenge my pride. There’s no way a man could exceed my skill at pleasing a woman.”

“Do you get much practice?” Natasha asked, amused. Yelena slid her breasts free of the bra, and removed the shirt neatly as well, pausing to stare admiringly at Natasha’s bare chest. 

“Please,” Yelena said, smirking through her admiration, and she caressed Natasha’s breasts with a gentle sort of reverence. “ _That_ equipment, I own.”

“You can’t practice cunnilingus on yourself,” Natasha pointed out. 

“Are you saying that the Winter Soldier has been on more assignations than I have?” Yelena asked, mock-exasperated, tossing her hair so it fell in curls across her bare shoulder.

Natasha had missed her. It had been so long since she’d witnessed Yelena’s sense of humor, which was wicked but usually did not serve her on her missions and so remained buried. 

“Perhaps,” Natasha said. “He’s kind of a slut.”

“Is he really,” Yelena said, pausing to regard her with honest curiosity.

“No,” Natasha laughed. “He’s really not.”

“I could challenge him,” Yelena said, “to a duel, not with knives but with tongues. Would you judge such a competition?”

Natasha considered it seriously, and shuddered, partly from the thought and partly from the way Yelena was caressing her. “I would,” she said, “but I might die. Still, I would die happy.”

“Oh, don’t think I haven’t thought of fucking you to death,” Yelena said sweetly, and set to work on Natasha’s jeans. In a moment they were both completely nude, and it was a long time, Natasha realized, since she had been with a woman. Even one so keen and sharp as Yelena was soft, her breasts a delightful soft press against Natasha’s, her legs smooth. Natasha slid a thigh between Yelena’s and was rewarded with the soft damp press of labia— and there was nothing wrong with a cock, to be sure, but to grind against a woman like this, all softness and strength and no delicate bits to worry about pressing too hard against or awkwardly hurting— it was so comfortable, so easy and sweet, and it brought up a quite different kind of desire, softer and hungrier all at once. 

It was not at all the same to make love to a woman as to fuck a man, and Natasha gave herself over to it without losing her vigilance. She didn’t lose herself as completely as she had with James that last time, but that had been exceptional and born of extraordinary circumstance. 

“Two,” Yelena said, as Natasha came again on her expertly-twisting fingers. “Oh, three?”

“It’s all true,” Natasha said on a gasp, bucking against her. “God— yes— oh.”

She had to grab Yelena by the hair and wrestle her down when it became too much. Yelena smirked. “Six,” Yelena said, licking her fingers, eyebrows quirked. 

“I lost count with James,” Natasha said with an elaborately careless shrug. “We’d have to rematch, to be sure.” She rolled on top of Yelena, relishing the soft slide of smooth skin against hers, the luxurious firm pressure of soft breasts to soft breasts. “Now. As for you, my dear—”

“Oh,” Yelena sighed, “yes, Natasha, isn’t this more fun than torture?”

“I promise,” Natasha said, mouthing her way down Yelena’s breasts to her ribs to her belly, “when I am done, you will not only want to help me get this equipment, but you’ll want to carry it back to my place for me and get the door too.”

“I look forward to the attempt,” Yelena said.

 

* * * 

 

“I’m comin’ back up,” Sam said. 

Steve stared at the phone for a moment. “Wait,” he said, “I thought you had no more leave time.”

“I don’t,” Sam said. “I’m out. But I— Natasha explained some things to me and I’ve got to come back up.”

Steve considered that. “You’ll lose your job,” he said. “I know you don’t— you can’t take any more time. You can’t.”

Sam sighed heavily. “I know,” he said. “But I back out now— listen, she told me some things about Bucky, I can’t go into it over the phone. He can’t, I can’t just leave you guys now. She’s right. I gotta come back up there. I can’t wait for the transfer. It might be another year, Steve. I can’t, it can’t wait that long.”

Steve considered it. On the one hand— Sam. He needed Sam here, that wasn’t anything to question at all. He missed Sam, he hated being apart from him. But on the other hand— 

“No,” he said, astonishing himself. “No, Sam, you can’t— you can’t quit your job. You’ve worked so goddamn hard to get where you are, you can’t throw that away over this.” 

And it was true. Sam had worked for that job, had struggled for it, spoke of it with such love and longing. He hated the administrative bullshit, he complained plenty about it, but he loved the job. Steve could never forgive himself for taking it away from Sam, not even if they found him another one. He’d already taken up enough of Sam’s time, enough of his life. It wouldn’t be fair to demand more. 

“I got to, though,” Sam said. “That’s the thing, Steve. And it’s okay. I’m going into this with open eyes. They’ve been open this whole time, man. I know. And it’s okay. I’m prepared to do it. I can sell my condo, Tony’s offering me a rent-free place to stay, I can live off what I got for a good long while and I know finding some kind of job up that way can’t take me all that long. I do get paid a bit for Falconing, Steve. This isn’t me giving everything up.”

“You didn’t want to, though,” Steve said. “And this— you didn’t sign up for this, Sam.”

“It’s cool, though,” Sam said. “I can do what’s gotta get done. I see shit through, Steve, it’s kind of what I do.”

Steve considered that, and his gut told him unequivocally that no, in fact, that was not true; Sam had already given more than was reasonable to the cause. “You do this,” Steve said slowly, “you’re going to be unhappy about it. I don’t want you to have to do that.”

“I’ll be fine,” Sam said. “I’m a big boy, Steve. I wouldn’t volunteer for it if I couldn’t hack it.”

Steve bit his lip. “I know that,” he said. “But you’re— Sam, no. You’ll regret it, you’ll resent Bucky, I don’t have to be all that good at people to know this is gonna go sour.” He rubbed his face. “I know shit’s fucked up but I can handle it, Sam. I’m not alone up here.” _Except, well, Natasha’s vanished and isn’t taking my calls. Whatever._  

Sam sighed heavily. “Steve,” he said. 

Time to break out the big guns, Steve thought, and said reluctantly, “Sam, you’re— you’re the first shot I’ve ever had at, at a… a real relationship.” It was the truth, was the thing. That was the secret to utter sincerity. “I may be inexperienced at this shit but it doesn’t take an expert to know that this’ll definitely fuck that up.”

Sam didn’t deny that. “This isn’t what this is about,” he said.

Steve wished fiercely in that moment that Sam was present, because he wasn’t in the slightest prepared to express this over the phone. “No,” he said quietly. “I know that. It’s— Sam.” He scrubbed his hand across his mouth. 

“If you don’t want me to come up,” Sam said, a little tightly.

“It’s not that,” Steve said. “God. Sam. It’s just— I don’t want you to have to mix yourself up in this.”

“Because I gotta admit,” Sam went on, speaking in a very alarmingly careful tone, “I been kinda bracin’ myself to get replaced. But that’s not what this is about, Steve. If you think it’s that— I just feel like I gotta see this through, I gotta help you get Bucky back.”

“Replaced,” Steve said blankly. 

“It’s cool,” Sam said, resigned, a little bitter, “if it goes down like that, I know I can’t really object. You’ve been in love since you were kids, and it’s— that’s cool, Steve, I’m not gonna fuss. You gotta do what you gotta do. I’m not just tryin’ to cling on, here. If that goes down I’m gonna be cool about it, you got that? It’s just, there’s actually danger, and I gotta see that through, Steve. I was thinkin’ about how I’d handle this if you and I hadn’t hooked up and I realized that I’d be there for you. I can’t not do that just to spare my own feelings.”

“Wait, wait,” Steve said. “Sam. No. That’s not— I’m not— Bucky and me, it’s not like that.” Shit. Shit.

“It’s okay if it is,” Sam said heavily. “That’s the thing, Steve. It’s okay if it is. It’s okay if that’s where that goes.”

Steve’s face went hot and his hands went cold, and he said, before he could stop himself, “Why, do you _want_ it to?” And it hurt, _wow_ did it hurt. “Please— Sam, please don’t,” and he sat down heavily in the chair by his bed, putting his face in his hands. 

“I didn’t say that,” Sam said, and now he sounded irritated. “I’m just sayin’— c’mon, Steve, you love this guy so much you’ve pretty much died for him twice. Don’t make this a martyr thing again. It’s okay, is what I’m sayin’, and you feel what you feel and don’t beat yourself up.”

Steve noticed dimly that his hands were shaking. “Sam,” he said, as steadily as he could manage, “don’t— you’re the only thing I have in my entire life that’s not fucking _broken_. I can’t— I can’t lose you, I don’t want to give you up for anything. Don’t do this, Sam, don’t let me break you too. Don’t let me break us. Don’t put this on me.”

“You didn’t break Bucky,” Sam said. “That’s not your fault. Don’t make it about you.”

“He was offered an honorable discharge,” Steve said bitterly, “in 1943, and he fuckin’ turned it down because I asked him to. They had his papers all ready, Sam. They were sendin’ him the fuck home, a war hero, back to his life and his family and his job, his mothers and his sisters, his pick of any girl in New York, he’d done his part, home free. And I asked him not to go. So he didn’t. That’s on me, Sam.”

“Yeah, but,” Sam said, and faltered. 

“It’s on me,” Steve said. “I did that. I had never fought in a real battle in my fucking life, and I went in and peeled him off a gurney where they’d been burning his arms with cigarettes and shoving needles under his fingernails, and I stared at the ghosts behind his eyes and asked him to suck it up and follow me back into it. There’s no way to sugar-coat that, Sam. There’s no way to make that not a shitty thing to do. There’s no way not to notice that it was incredibly, obnoxiously self-righteous of me. I destroy people, Sam, I suck them dry, I get them to throw themselves in the path of bullets. You know how many loyal SHIELD agents my fine stirring speech got killed at the Triskelion? That’s what I do, Sam, I destroy people.”

“Steve,” Sam said softly.

“I’m aware,” Steve said, and it was like he was observing himself, like someone else was saying the words, and it hurt, every word hurt, “that this is the cost of doing business. I’m pretty philosophical about it, generally. I’m kind of a ruthless person and mostly, I’m okay with that. Someone has to do these things and it might as well be me. But just, maybe, for once, I’d like to be a little bit selfish and maybe, just maybe, one time, get to have one person in my life who I haven’t completely fucking destroyed. I know I’ve dragged you through a lot of shit, and I do mean a lot, but I was kind of pleased, you know, that maybe you’d actually be healthy enough to put up some boundaries and not just let me suck you dry, like I do to everyone.”

“Steve,” Sam said again, and he sounded almost shocked. 

“It’s an expensive proposition,” Steve said, “being Captain America. And I knew that going in. I had nothing, so I had nothing to lose. Bucky, he had a lot to lose, Sam, and I cost him every bit of it. Everything. I even cost him his right to _die_.” He paused a moment, letting that sink in. “That’s on me, Sam. Don’t let me do the same to you. Don’t put that on me. I can’t handle that.”

“Wow,” Sam said finally. 

“I’m not being dramatic,” Steve said, a little annoyed at Sam’s tone. “I’m being fucking selfish, because I just can’t— Sam, I’ve never had— I’m not stupid. I’m inexperienced at this stuff but I’m not stupid. I know if I let you come back up here and lose everything to help me, I’m going to lose any chance at ever being happy with you. And I just—“

“There’s too much at stake,” Sam said, and he sounded sad now. “Steve, Bucky could die and get you killed too. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about here.”

“I am aware,” Steve said, “of the dangers.” 

“No,” Sam said, “Natasha was here, and she told me— Department X stuff, Steve. And I can’t— if I know what to look for, maybe I can find it. She’s in Russia trying to find the equipment to fix it.”

“Find it,” Steve echoed, taken aback. 

“And I can’t— I can’t just tell you what to look for, Steve,” Sam said. “Because he’s— well, we’ll just say he’s being monitored, in a way? It’s complicated, Steve. But if he knows you know something’s wrong, then they’ll kill him. Or you. Both. I don’t know. It’s spy stuff and it’s not my forte either.”

“Clint,” Steve said, realizing. “Clint knows.”

Sam paused for a long moment. “Yes,” he said. 

“That’s why he’s been hanging around so… casually,” Steve said, squinting as he thought about it. “And— yeah, Bucky’s acting weirder. I think he’s stopped sleeping, but he won’t let me catch him at it.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Well, you can’t let on, is the thing, Steve. And I gotta come up— Natasha has a lead, it’s complicated. But I— yeah, I’ll lose my job, Steve, but I can get another one and I won’t hold it against you. This is bigger than that, bigger than us.”

“Don’t come up yet,” Steve said. “Does Tony know?”

“Oh God he’s even worse at keeping secrets than you are,” Sam said. “You can’t— Steve, you’ve got to act like you have no idea.”

Steve rubbed his face. “Sam,” he said, “I’m more of a spy than you are. And I’ve been lying since before your grandmother was born. I know I usually don’t bother to do it well but for this, I can. Tell me everything you know.”

“I don’t know much,” Sam said, “and I’ve already said too much. I bet you’ve got me on speakerphone.”

Steve hesitated. “Well,” he said. 

“Yeah,” Sam said. “You one hundred percent sure Bucky’s not in the air vent?”

“Yes,” Steve said. He glanced over at his laptop. “I have the security camera feed active in his room. That’s how I know he’s not sleeping.” Bucky was sitting hunched in the chair in his bedroom, headphones on, one leg up over the arm of the chair, watching something on his phone with apparent raptness.

There was a long silence. “Oh,” Sam said. 

“I’m better at this than I let on,” Steve said. “When I have to be. When there’s nobody else to do my dirty work. I can do it, I just generally don’t.”

Sam breathed, maybe a sigh, Steve couldn’t tell. “You’re a hard man to pin down,” Sam said. 

“I got depths,” Steve said wryly. His hands were shaking, he noted absently, but he knew his voice sounded normal. Christ. Of course something quantifiable was wrong with Bucky. Getting tied up in a basement wouldn’t be enough to unhinge the guy when, y’know, seventy years of brainwashing hadn’t been. 

“I’ll say,” Sam said. 

“I know usually it’s best when I leave you and Natasha to plot,” Steve said, “but I can’t risk you like this, Sam. I want you to come up here, I do, more than anything, but I don’t want it to be at the expense of your job. I want you to make it happen on your own terms.”

Sam definitely sighed this time. “I’ll come up Friday night,” he said. “Just promise me you’ll be really really careful. That’s two days away. Even if I did drop everything I couldn’t realistically come up before that.”

“Let me at least buy the plane tickets,” Steve said. 

Sam laughed, a little hollowly. “Naw,” he said, “I’m abusing Stark for the transportation. He doesn’t know it but Pepper does. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” Steve said. Two days. “Okay, Sam. It’s a deal.”

“It is,” Sam said, and his voice went soft. “We’ll be okay, Steve. Just— promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I’m always careful,” Steve said. 

“You’re never careful,” Sam countered. 

Steve considered that. “Well,” he said, “okay, you have a point. But I will be, in this case. I’m learning.”

 

* * * 

 

This time Tony heard the door, and flipped up his goggles in time not to be startled by Steve Rogers standing on the other side of his workbench.

He flapped a hand to get JARVIS to turn the music down, and said, “Hey, Cap. Check it out.” He gestured at the workbench, which contained the framework of Bucky’s new arm, which was near-complete. “Almost there.”

Rogers nodded thoughtfully. He looked— well, he looked really tired, which was not particularly new, and he was doing his Heroic Jawline thing, which indicated something was bugging him. “How’s Bucksicle?” Tony asked, guessing at the source of the dark circles under Rogers’s eyes.

“Did you ever figure out what all of those neural implants were for?” Steve asked. 

Tony blinked at him. “All of them?” he asked.

“There were extras,” Steve said. “Did you ever solve that mystery?”

Tony turned off the torch and set it aside, retrieving a towel and wiping his face. He pulled the goggles off his head and set them on the workbench, then pulled up a holographic screen. Rogers was more comfortable with them than formerly; he focused on it with little trouble. “No,” Tony said slowly. “But I have some hunches.” He tapped on an image, one of his more recent scans of Barnes’s head, and pulled it up, then next to it set an image from one of the first scans he’d taken that showed the same area. “So these two components here, they’re never active when I scan him. I’ve had him go through everything, you know, try to move fingers, etc., and those components never activate, never light up.”

“Right,” Rogers said. Tony knew he’d said as much in the briefing he’d given them initially. 

“But here’s the thing,” Tony said. “It’s not like they’re never being used. Check this out.” He enlarged both scans. “There are new neural connections. Like in a brain that’s in use, there are always new pathways being developed? These areas, this one in particular, have just a massive amount of new pathways being formed. As though the area were being used heavily.”

“Huh,” Rogers said. And he definitely had a conclusion he was drawing, but he was keeping his own counsel about it.

“You got something to add,” Tony said. “I know you do.” Rogers was looking at the scans, sucking on his teeth thoughtfully. He looked pretty grim. “Is it something to do with how your cyborg friend is sometimes a different person and wanders around the tower at night plundering esoteric electronic parts from my workshop? He was making a transmitter the other day.”

Rogers’s expression went blank for a moment, then hardened again. “A transmitter,” he said. 

“Granted, the Barnesbot is pretty good with technology for a fellow from Ye Olden Times,” Tony said, “but even still, it was a pretty sophisticated transmitter, and JARVIS confirmed that he hadn’t looked up the diagram through any channels he could track. Which is all of them. So he pulled this either out of his mind or out of a book I’ve never seen him with.”

Rogers pulled something out of his pocket, thunking it onto the workbench. Tony picked it up. It was the transmitter in question. “He left this on the coffee table,” Rogers said. “I figured I should have you look at it.”

“Huh,” Tony said, turning it over. The interface was… huh. A bunch of bare pins. Nothing standard. Self-contained, but crude, power source. 

“Do you know where Natasha is?” Rogers asked. 

“No,” Tony said, tilting his head with interest. “She doesn’t tend to check in with me, much. She did just send me a weird email full of technical specifications in Russian, which I’ve had JARVIS translating but a lot of it is proprietary acronyms that fluency in Russian doesn’t make any less opaque.”

“She’s in Russia,” Rogers said. “She’s tracking down Department X equipment, I think.”

Tony stared for a moment, letting those connections snap into place. “So you think she’s got some idea of what those mystery components in Barnes’s head are for.”

“Yes,” Rogers said. 

“Did she say as much?” Tony asked. 

“No,” Rogers admitted. 

“But you figure,” Tony said, and then stopped talking while his brain whirred through the alphabet soup of technical documentation Natasha had sent him. There was nothing in there about brain implants, not as such, but there was definitely a lot about electrodes and perhaps virtual reality, if the translation was correct, and that could interface somehow with brain implants. “Huh.”

“What?” Rogers asked, frowning at the screen as if that were what Tony was thinking about. 

“No,” Tony said, mostly to himself, then pulled up the screen of text and scrolled through it. “No, it’s not… I don’t think…”

“Not what,” Rogers said patiently. 

“Gimme a minute,” Tony said. Rogers crossed his arms— holy biceps whoa _Tony no_ — focus— and Tony managed to tear his gaze away and think about technical documentation instead. 

“Is that what she sent you?” Rogers asked, stepping around the workbench and standing closer, leaning in to read over Tony’s shoulder. 

“Yeah,” Tony said. He scrolled, scanning absently. “It’s… not about Barnes, though. There’s nothing real specific about him. She flagged a couple phrases that I think she meant to indicate were references to him and to his codename, but none of them are… specifically about his brain. Or his arm. Just mentioning that these machines were used on him.”

Rogers was silent, and Tony spared him a glance to see that he was regarding the diagrams for the machines with undisguised horror. “These… look like torture devices,” he said finally. 

“Hm?” Tony looked back; he hadn’t really noticed the aesthetics. “Oh. Uh, I don’t— no, they’re definitely not designed to inflict pain. That’s all just… interface. Electronic interface. It seems to interact with the brain in a really sophisticated way. This… I know he’s made offhand comments about false memories. I think this is the thing that put them there.”

Rogers looked sick, and Tony supposed he couldn’t blame him— he’d been so busy, himself, being fascinated by how such a thing could work that it hadn’t occurred to him that it was actually pretty reprehensible to contemplate it being used on an unwilling subject. “That’s awful,” Rogers said finally. 

“Yeah,” Tony said, “but also incredibly fascinating. I mean— how much control could they have? Is it really possible to interface with a human brain on that level of detail? Can you imagine what it would be like if they used this for… well, pretty much anything but what they did?” Some of his enthusiasm ebbed in the face of Rogers’s obvious distress. 

“No,” Rogers said finally. “I can’t.” 

They stood in silence a moment longer, Tony accidentally getting absorbed in the documentation again, before Rogers cleared his throat. “I can’t look at this,” he admitted. “So do you think this has anything we can use to figure out what’s in Bucky’s head, or not?”

“Oh,” Tony said, “the machine itself does. I don’t know if this documentation does.”

Rogers nodded slowly. “I got a pretty good idea that whatever’s in Bucky isn’t exactly planning on anything good,” he said. “I kind of need a way to know more about what’s going on.”

“If Romanoff gets this machine,” Tony said, “we’ll have all the information we can stand.”

“Will you know how to use it?” Rogers asked skeptically. “Because I’m not exactly eager to let you strap him into something like that just to see what happens.”

“I can figure it out,” Tony said. 

“Mm-hmm,” Rogers said. “You understand it that well.” He was not convinced at all. 

“Do I have to do the song and dance where I remind you that I’m a genius?” Tony said, annoyed. 

“Only if I get to do the dance where I remind you this is the inside of Bucky’s already-really-fucked-up brain,” Rogers said. 

“He’s doing okay,” Tony answered defensively.

“Except for the part where there’s someone else inside his head,” Steve said. “And Natasha is in Russia because she thinks this machine has something to do with it, is what I’m putting together.”

“Fair,” Tony said. “Fair point. Well, I’ll know more when I see it.” He frowned. “How _is_ Buckarino? You never answered.” 

“What,” Steve said blankly. Probably thrown by the nickname. 

“JARVIS,” Tony said, “where’s Bucky?”

“He is in the common floor’s lounge area, Sir,” Jarvis said. “With Mr. Barton.”

“You got eyes on him?” Tony asked. 

“He is within the camera’s range, yes, Sir,” Jarvis said. 

“Well?” Tony waved a hand. 

“Well, ah,” Jarvis prevaricated, which was odd. 

“What’s going on?” Rogers asked, suddenly anxious. 

“Well, nothing bad,” JARVIS said, and displayed the camera feed on the screen. 

“Oh my God,” Tony said. 

“Well,” Rogers said after a long moment. Tony looked over at him. He looked… amused. He caught Tony’s gaze and started giggling helplessly. 

“I, are you, have you finally lost your mind?” Tony asked, but it was funny and he couldn’t not laugh too. 

“I gotta, I gotta say,” Rogers said, trying and failing to collect himself, “of all the things— I didn’t— I didn’t expect _that_.”

“Jesus,” Tony said, and they laughed until neither of them could stand. 

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Bucky,” Rogers said, bracing himself against the workbench and wiping his face. “Jesus fuckin’ _Christ_.”

“I never thought the stories were true,” Tony said a little wonderingly, scraping himself up off the floor. 

“Jesus,” Rogers said weakly. “Jesus.”

“I was gonna get him down here,” Tony said, “but I, uh, I don’t wanna stop him.”

It was enough to set Rogers off again, and he landed in a heap on the floor, squeaking. “I just— it’s not funny,” he said finally, wiping his face.

“It’s fucking hilarious,” Tony said. 

“No no,” Rogers said, “no, I just— I didn’t expect—“ An unexpected spasm of laughter made him snort, and it set them both off again. 

Well, they’d both needed a good laugh.

 

 

* * * 

 

 

The problem with not sleeping at all was that it made it hard to regulate your body temperature. Bucky sat in the living room of the common area fixedly staring at the window, eyes gritty and head aching where his jaw wouldn’t stop clenching. 

If he slept, Zola would take over. And Zola kept holding his jaw shut so he couldn’t tell anyone. He had tried to write instead, to text someone, to scribble even a note, but he couldn’t. He was compulsively biting at the skin next to his fingernails and all of his fingers were bleeding, and someone was going to notice. 

It was a goddamn nightmare. The only thing he could do was try to keep anyone from noticing that he wasn’t sleeping, that he was hurting himself, because if they did they’d probably sedate him, which was pretty much the one thing he didn’t want. That was kind of how all this had started in the first place. 

He was so cold, and everything hurt. His stomach was all twisted-up and sick, burning, painful, and keeping food down was hard. He’d eaten enough antacids that he was gonna be shitting chalk and it still hadn’t helped. And he was due for another surgery day after tomorrow, the final components of the metal infrastructure to mount the prosthesis to, and he didn’t know how to ask to postpone it. Because if they put him under, Zola was gonna be the one to wake up. And nobody seemed to be able to see it. Zola had taken over a handful of times, and it had been hours before Bucky’d managed to shove him back down. And sometimes people had looked at him funny, but nobody really suspected what was going on. Natasha was gone; she’d’ve known, he’d thought, maybe, but she hadn’t seemed to catch on that time when Zola had woken up in her bed, and then she’d left. 

Clint was watching him a lot, but it was impossible to read the guy, impossible to know if he understood. Tony had apparently been fooled by Zola on the now two occasions he’d encountered him in his workroom. The only hope Bucky had was that the thing he had been building had gone missing. Someone, probably Steve, had moved it from where he’d left it out on the coffee table in the common area. That thing was absolutely the end, for Bucky, whatever it was— it would let Zola connect to the network, and Bucky didn’t really understand that— his brain wasn’t a computer— but once he was networked Zola could contact all other iterations of himself, and Bucky couldn’t see Zola’s thoughts as clearly as Zola seemed to be able to see his but he could see enough to understand that Zola was going to take JARVIS over, was going to assume control of the Tower, was going to unleash some kind of massive apocalyptic devastation using Bucky’s body. And he was going to bide his time to do this entirely until the prosthetic was attached, because it would mean Bucky’s body would be strong enough to defeat Steve. 

Which was why Bucky couldn’t sleep now, and might have to sabotage Tony’s work somehow to delay the fitting of the prosthesis. 

He was just so goddamn alone in all this. 

And there wasn’t enough coffee in the world. 

“Aww, no,” Clint said, startling Bucky badly, “did you finish the whole pot?”

Bucky hastily shoved his bloody fingers under his thigh. “Did I?” he said innocently, wincing inwardly as his voice came out a harsh croak. 

“Jeez,” Clint said, leaning over the back of the couch to look at him. “You look like shit.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “thanks.”

“I’m not tryin’ to be an asshole,” Clint said. “Gonna make another pot. You want more?”

Bucky’s stomach twisted unpleasantly, a wash of acid up the back of his throat. He grimaced. “Sure,” he said. 

Clint rummaged in the kitchen, humming tunelessly— guy could probably sing decently but he certainly wasn’t bothering. 

_I give you the usual choice,_ Zola purred, _silence or another seizure. Is your tongue healed after the last one?_

_Fuck you_ , Bucky thought back sourly, and brought his thumb up to worry at the torn flesh with his teeth again. The pain didn’t deter Zola much, but it helped Bucky focus enough that he could kinda drown him out. Sometimes music did too, but he’d killed the battery on his phone and was too exhausted to find a charger just now. He’d really been hoping Steve would turn up.

“Jesus,” Clint said, “what’d you do to your hand?”

“Nothing,” Bucky said, jerking awake— he’d been drifting, fuck— and shoving his hand back under his leg. “Hangnail.”

“Yeah okay,” Clint said, dropping down to sit next to him and regarding him with an inscrutable expression. 

Zola’s control clamped down like a cold hand on the back of Bucky’s neck, and made him turn his head a little, made his expression go noncommittal, tried to pry his jaw open and make him speak. _Fuck you_ , Bucky thought desperately, _fuck off_ , but he was slipping. 

_You can’t hold me off forever,_ Zola said smugly. Out loud he said, “I do find the dry air cracks my skin something awful, and then I just can’t help biting it. It’s a deplorable habit.”

Clint stared blankly at him. “Yeah,” he said slowly. 

_Christ, you talk like a fuckin’ robot_ , Bucky thought disgustedly. Shit. He hadn’t meant to clue Zola in. It was his only hope, that somebody would eventually think to ask themselves whether Bucky actually knew words like “deplorable”. 

Well. He did. But whether he’d use them was another question entirely. Unfortunately nobody seemed to be paying enough attention to pick up on that.

_And you have the mind of a filthy animal,_ Zola answered, unconcerned. Bucky mustered every last ounce of his strength and before he could think too hard (if he thought too much, Zola saw it and counteracted him), he reached out and grabbed Clint around the back of his neck, pulling him in and planting a solid kiss on him. 

Homosexuality was the only thing that still reliably disgusted Zola enough to make him recoil. He was resigned enough to it by now that just thinking about it didn’t do much anymore, but acting on it— well, Bucky’d reclaimed himself a couple times with sloppy gross morning-breath good-morning kisses to Steve, and it was a trick he was pretty pleased with. 

But Steve wasn’t here, Steve was up to something, had been missing all day, and Zola wouldn’t let Bucky look for him anyway. So Bucky slid his tongue into Clint’s astonishment-slack mouth, and tapped his fingers on the back of Clint’s neck. Di-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-dit. SOS. Everyone knew that one. 

Clint hesitated for a moment, frozen, then kissed back, more enthusiastic than Bucky had expected, curling his tongue behind Bucky’s front teeth and sucking on Bucky’s lower lip. “Mm,” he said in a moment, “Barnes, I didn’t know you cared.”

Di-di-di-dit dit di-dah-di-dit di-dah-dah-dit. H-E-L-P. 

Clint sucked Bucky’s lower lip back into his mouth, slid his tongue across the front of Bucky’s teeth, and pulled back just a little bit to murmur, “What do you want me to do?”

Dah-dah-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-dah-di-dit di-dah. Z-O-L-A, Bucky tapped, doing his damnedest to pay no more attention than necessary to his fingers. Zola was disgusted enough to hopefully not notice what Bucky was doing with his hand. Di-dit dah-dit dah-dah dit. I-N M-E.

“That’s hot,” Clint murmured. “God. Natasha knew what she was talking about, huh?”

“Really,” Bucky said breathlessly. “She told you about me?”

“Oh yeah,” Clint said, cupping Bucky’s face in both hands. “She understands you better than you realize.” He worked his mouth for a second, squinting one eye. “You really need some gum though. Damn you’ve had a lotta coffee.”

“Well,” Bucky said, “you know, it’s not like I want to go to sleep, I never know which side of the bed I’ll wake up on.”

“Gotcha,” Clint said, and to his credit, he leaned forward and kissed Bucky again. “I’m assuming this is relevant,” he murmured. 

“Freaks him out,” Bucky answered, too tired for more obliqueness, then attempted to bury it with a “yeah, you know, Natasha’s pretty freaky, I bet she knows all about it” before Zola caught on.

“She really does,” Clint said. 

Zola made a halfhearted attempt to yank him backward but Clint took one look at his face— which probably showed his desperation and terror pretty clearly, and yanked him back in. “I got you,” he said, sucking Bucky’s lower lip into his mouth. “I got you.” 

Bucky fisted his hand in the back of Clint’s shirt, feeling himself shaking. Clint was petting him, petting his back, holding him close and sucking lazily on his tongue. Dah-dah-dah dah-dit-dah, Clint tapped out. O-K. 

_Is that Morse code?_ Zola said suddenly. _You little bastard._

“Fuck,” Bucky said, as Zola’s control clamped down on him, yanking his head back, yanking his spine straight. “Fuck—“ 

_You aren’t even queer,_ Zola sneered, _you’re only doing it to distract me. Well, you’re done now. I’ve re-established the connection I need. No more seizures, I have something better now._

Pain slammed through Bucky’s spine and he screamed helplessly, limbs going nerveless. He dimly heard Clint shouting to JARVIS, something about Tony, but he couldn’t focus on anything. It was worse than a seizure, a million times worse, and he couldn’t stop screaming. 

 

* * * 

 

“How often does this happen to you?” Tony asked Clint. 

“What happen to me?” Clint asked, harried. He and Steve were both still holding Barnes down, even though the sedative had kicked in and apart from the odd occasional twitch, he had gone mostly limp. He’d screamed himself voiceless. 

“That you make out with someone and it gives them a seizure,” Tony said. 

Clint stared at him. “Were you fucking watching that?” he demanded, not letting go of Bucky’s arm. 

“I had JARVIS bring up the surveillance to see where Bucky was,” Tony said, suddenly aware that both Clint and Steve were glaring at him. 

“Could you see the Morse code he was tapping on my neck?” Clint asked. “The whole thing was so he could give me the message. Jesus, Tony.” 

“Morse code,” Steve said. 

Clint carefully peeled one hand away from Bucky’s intermittently-trembling arm and tapped on the table. Z-O-L-A. Steve’s eyes went wide and he sucked in his breath and looked as incandescently furious as Clint had ever seen him, and he’d seen him pretty bad. 

“My Morse code is rusty,” Tony said. 

“Zola,” Steve breathed. He was staring at Bucky in horror. 

Clint tapped out I-N M-E. “That’s a direct quote,” he added a little awkwardly. 

“In me,” Steve said grimly. “Zola, in me?”

“Yeah,” Clint said. “He also said ‘help’ and ‘sos’ but I think he was just trying to figure out if I knew Morse code.”

“Fuck,” Steve breathed, eyes closing. 

“Zola,” Tony said. “Like, like Arnim Zola?”

“I don’t know what that is,” Clint said, “but whatever it is, it caught on that he was using Morse code when I answered him in it, I think. And fuck you, Tony, that wasn’t a seizure, whatever that was.”

“Still,” Tony said. He was frowning intently at a monitor. “Gives new meaning to bein’ a knockout. I didn’t know you were gay, man.”

“I’m not,” Clint said. He had to pause and take a deep breath. “I figured out pretty quick what was goin’ on. Whatever Zola is, it doesn’t like it when he kisses dudes. He was doing it to try to get out from under its control. I watched it take him over for a second, it was creepy as fuck, Tony. Whatever this Zola thing is, it’s got near-complete control over him a pretty good proportion of the time.”

“Arnim Zola,” Steve said tightly, “is the HYDRA scientist who made Bucky the Winter Soldier in the first place. He made himself into an artificial intelligence, and we blew him up right before we took the Insight helicarriers down, but I guess there were copies.”

“Oh sweet Christ,” Tony said, “and one of them is in his head.” He tapped something in the diagram. “That’s what those extra inputs do. Jesus Christ. He’s got an evil Nazi genius in his head. You just made out with an evil Nazi genius in a Soviet assassin’s body.”

“It was on my bucket list,” Clint said, having finally met and surpassed the point where Tony could even get to him anymore. “I can scratch off two at once. Sweet. Can you get the evil Nazi genius out of his head? I thought the inputs couldn’t be removed.”

“Well,” Tony said. The sentence didn’t go anywhere, and after a moment he said, “well,” again.

“That doesn’t sound hopeful,” Clint said. Steve was holding both of Bucky’s feet and looked like he’d been shot. “Take a breath, Cap.”

“How could I not see that,” Steve said, sounding broken. “How— his worst fucking _nightmare_.”

“You knew something was wrong,” Tony offered consolingly. “Well, fuck. This explains a lot.” He rubbed his face. “How long can we keep him under? I gotta figure out how to get this thing outta him.”

“I called the doc, she’s on her way in,” Steve said. “She can probably keep him under a while, at least.” He hadn’t let go of Bucky’s feet. 

“Hey,” Clint said. “Now that we know, we can fix it.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and sent a text to Natasha: “ID’d Bucky’s rider. Zola. Bucky under sedation. Ideas?”

“How long,” Steve said softly. “How long has it been like this for him?”

“I could probably find you a start date,” Tony said, doing something esoteric on his screen. Clint wasn’t watching; it was easier not to. Tony made him dizzy. “Not real long, though, Cap. Lighten up on yourself, we’ll sort it out.”

“If Tony can’t get him out,” Clint said quietly, “Natasha can. That’s what she’s looking for.”

His phone buzzed, and he looked. Natasha. “Shit,” was all her text said. Well, that wasn’t reassuring. He waited a moment, and finally she followed up with, “Keep him under, I’ll be there tomorrow.” 

“Can we wait for her to get back?” Steve asked. By way of answer, Clint turned his phone so Steve could read it. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Tony said. 

“Tomorrow,” Clint confirmed. “She’ll be here tomorrow. She’ll know what to do.”


	14. O Chained Hound of Emain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zola's hand is forced. Lakeisha learns some things about herself. There's a lot of blood.  
> Warning for some body horror, no explicit gore.  
> Also mild racism which is near-immediately avenged.

_Brooklyn, 1931_

 

_“That is enough,” said Ferdiad; “I die by that. And I may say, indeed, you have left me sick after you, and it was not right that I should fall by your hand. O Hound of the beautiful feats, it was not right, you to kill me; the fault of my death is yours, it is on you my blood is. A foolish man does not escape when he goes into the gap of danger; my grief I am going away, my end is come. My ribs will not hold my heart, my heart is all turned to blood. I have not done well in the battle; you have killed me, Cuchulain.”_

 

Bucky tipped the book down and looked over the top of it at his two charges. His youngest sister Kitty was curled in a little ball resting against his hip, and Steve was propped up against the headboard of the bed.

It was only because Bucky was such a robustly healthy child, a month past his 14th birthday, that he was allowed in the sickroom. He’d had the cold already, and it had been ugly but had passed and left him hale enough. But it had settled in both Kitty and Steve’s weak lungs, and the two of them were both deathly ill with pneumonia. They were staying with Sarah Rogers, because she was a nurse and knew what to do with respiratory illnesses, and Bucky was grown-up enough to be her assistant, which he was taking very seriously.

Steve was asleep, his breathing shallow and labored but reassuringly audible. His butt was propped against Bucky’s hip to keep him upright in his sleep, his knees bent over Bucky’s lap. Kitty was curled on the other side, and she wasn’t breathing loudly but he could feel her ribs rise and fall. Her eyes were open, too, watching him drowsily. 

“Want me to keep reading?” Bucky asked. 

She shook her head. Talking was hard sometimes, so she didn’t, but she put her cheek against him and sighed a little. He shut the book and put his hand in her hair. He had his back resting against the wall, and since it was an interior wall it wasn’t cold. 

“Good story, acushla?” he asked. 

She nodded, and closed her eyes, nestling herself closer to his body. He petted her hair for a little while, and she finally dropped off to sleep. 

Steve woke himself then with a coughing fit, and Bucky wrapped his fingers around Steve’s knee. “Hey,” he said softly, “it’s okay.”

Steve blinked at him. “Hey,” he said. “Bucky.” He wheezed, and from the line between his eyebrows Bucky could tell it hurt him to breathe. “Did I fall asleep?”

“A little, yeah,” Bucky said. 

“Didn’t mean to miss the story,” Steve said. 

Bucky shrugged. “I’ve read it like eight times so far,” he said. “No fear.”

“Was just gettin’ to the good part though,” Steve said. 

“It’s okay,” Bucky said. “Don’t talk, Steve, save your breath.” 

“I’m fine,” Steve said, and wheezed. 

“Budge up,” Bucky said, and pulled at Steve’s shoulder until Steve came and leaned next to him. Steve tipped his head down on Bucky’s shoulder forlornly. 

“Tired of being sick,” he confessed. 

“I know,” Bucky said, and kissed the top of his head the way he would if Steve was his sister. He picked the book back up. He couldn’t really remember where he’d left off; he read this book to Kitty so much he’d half-memorized parts of it. 

 

_“What use is it to me to rise up now, and he after falling by me?” said Cuchulain. “But Laeg said: “Rise up, O chained Hound of Emain; it is glad and shouting you have a right to be now, since Ferdiad of the hosts has fallen by you.” “What are joy and shouting to me now?” said Cuchulain, “it is to madness and to grief I am driven after the thing I have done, and the body I wounded so hard.” “It is not right for you to be lamenting him,” said Laeg. “It is making rejoicing over him you should be. It was at you he aimed his spears.” But Cuchulain said, “Even if he had cut one arm and one leg from me, it is my grief Ferdiad not to be riding his horses through the long days of his lifetime.”_

 

 

* * * 

_D. C., 2014_

 

The target wasn’t exactly unwary, but she presented no resistance. She was a plump, middle-aged woman sitting at her kitchen table with all the lights on at three in the morning, drinking coffee and working on an embroidery in a small hoop with spare floss spread out all over the table. 

The infiltration team came silently in through the back door after surrounding the little suburban house, and she set her coffee down and looked over her glasses at Maria, who had led the team herself. “Oh good,” she said, “you didn’t break the door. I was hoping this would be quiet.” She put her needle neatly into the fabric and held her hands up over her head. “I hope you’re not contractors.”

“Keep your hands where we can see them,” Maria said, “and open your mouth.”

“Oh,” the woman said, “I won’t crush the cyanide capsule, don’t worry. Want me to pull it out myself?”

“I’d rather you keep your hands where I can see them,” Maria said, not lowering her gun, “and keep your mouth open.”

“Fair,” the woman said. “Back lower right.” She opened her mouth, and sure enough, there was an off-looking tooth in her lower jaw on the right. Maria steeled herself and yanked it out. “ _Nnn_ gh,” the woman said, and turned her head to spit. “Thanks.” 

“What do you know about the Winter Soldier,” Maria demanded. 

“You can’t expect me to speak here,” the woman said. “Surely you expect the house to be bugged.”

Maria rolled her eyes. “Great,” she said, and cuffed the woman, bundling her into the waiting van. 

“Someone noticed my message,” the woman said, looking tired but pleased. 

“We suspected,” Maria said. 

“It’s not actually possible to defect from HYDRA,” the woman said. “I’ve been collecting all the information I can on Barnes and on his project, and I can tell you, he’s in bad trouble right now. I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t arrest me before my superiors noticed how badly I was doing at keeping my tracks covered.” 

“So you wanted us to capture you,” Maria said. 

“Well,” the woman said, “it was either that or get tortured to death by my erstwhile coworkers. Which would be incredibly unpleasant, and also would mean there was nobody to save Barnes from Zola.”

“Zola,” Maria said. 

“Oh dear,” the woman said. “You hadn’t noticed?”

 

* * * 

_Queens, 2014_

 

Lakeisha woke up to a text from a number she didn’t know, but it said, “The working with incomplete information chick is totally HYDRA”, and so she made an educated guess. 

“Hill?” she wrote back. In a moment the message came back. 

“Yes, sorry— just wanted to let u know the hunch was right.”

“Cool,” Lakeisha texted back. “See you later today?”

“If we’re done interrogating her by then,” Hill answered. 

“Does she know anything about Bucky?” 

“Claims to,” Hill wrote. “Don’t want to let her near him though— all he needs is for her to have the verbal override commands.”

“Good point,” Lakeisha wrote, and rolled over; it was time to get out of bed anyway. “Get her name, though, I’ll find out if Barnes knows her.”

“Good call,” Hill wrote. “Regina Wells is apparently her real name, enough so that it’s what HYDRA knows her as.”

“Roger that,” Lakeisha wrote back, and groggily dressed herself. A solid six hours of sleep was about the best she could do lately. Dorothea, it turned out, was pregnant, not just a little under the weather, so she wasn’t really in as great shape to be helpful as Lakeisha had really been hoping. Oh well, she knew what that was like. Dorothea had a 1-year-old named Magdalena already, cute as a bug and hyperactive, and they were both having trouble to adjusting so many more hours that their kids thought they were strangers. 

Jimmy was latching on pretty well to Jeremy, her brother, and Jeremy didn’t seem to mind that much. It seemed to be good for him; he’d been having trouble holding down a job, so now Lakeisha was paying him to babysit and he seemed to like that and didn’t see it as charity. It was good, he wouldn’t mess things up with his own nephew and it gave him something to do that was arguably healthy. 

Fuck, Lakeisha was exhausted and she just needed a goddamned day off. And she couldn’t go in with her hair just looking like whatever, and she was starting to think maybe she was going to have to just get a fucking wig or something because she was surrounded by white people all the damn time and— 

Man, of all the things to worry about. Fuck it, she was going to take a few moments to herself to look presentable. She showered, washed her hair, deep-conditioned it, blow-dried it, flat-ironed it, put her face on, dressed in the nicest clean blouse she had and some reasonably respectable jeans, put on understated jewelry that matched, and regarded herself in the mirror. Fuck, she was just a dumb kid and these people were super-spies and terrorists and counterterrorists and super soldiers and she didn’t know anything about anything. 

But hell. She had to do her best. And she was young enough that caffeine and a proper shower could go a long way toward replacing sleep. And she looked fine and was not at all going to be intimidated by these people. These superheroes. And superspies. 

And goddamn supervillains.

 

 

Superhero or not, Steve Rogers was sitting on the floor in the hallway with his phone in his lap and both hands in his hair, his enormous shoulders hunched over, looking like maybe he’d been shot. 

“Steve,” Lakeisha said, horrified, and ran the last few steps to him. “Are you okay?”

He breathed in sharply and looked up at her, and his expression was— it was terrible, she’d never seen him look like that. “It’s his worst nightmare,” Steve said hollowly. “He’s been— locked in his head— with that, that _monster_ — I don’t know what to do.” 

Lakeisha considered that a moment, and finally said, “Slow down, Steve. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Steve visibly pulled himself together, wiping his hand across his face and steeling himself. “Bucky’s got… an AI in his brain, in the inputs where the neural hookups for the arm go— there’s some kind of interface in there, we don’t really know yet how it works but he managed to get a message out. The AI is the recorded personality of the guy who… who made him a super soldier. A Nazi scientist. Who experimented on him and… tortured him. Zola. Arnim Zola.”

“I’ve heard that name,” Lakeisha said slowly, thinking. 

“The AI’s been in there the whole time, as far as we can tell, but after the abduction it started being able to form new connections and control Bucky’s body, to the point that it could keep him from telling anyone.” Steve sighed. “Apparently it’s been manually triggering seizures to keep Bucky from giving it away. And by now it has largely assumed control of his body. But Bucky’s still in there.”

“Oh my God,” Lakeisha said. 

“Yeah,” Steve said. She set her back against the wall and slid down beside him. 

“That explains some things,” she said slowly. Her guts were numb as she worked through the implications. “Oh God. That explains some things.” And she’d just been so tired that she’d only really been impatient with him, gotten frustrated when he wouldn’t speak, had never even guessed why he couldn’t. “Aw jeez, Bucky.”

“Yeah,” Steve said again. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, squaring his shoulders. “Natasha’s on her way, with some…” He shook his head, at a loss to describe it. “Something technological from a defunct Soviet program, says she knows it’ll help. Tony’s going over schematics of it and trying to figure out what does what. I wanted to get Bucky to give me some leads on where we could find any HYDRA techs who’d understand the technology but he’s clearly in no state to give it, we have him sedated instead. And restrained.” Steve shuddered. “There’s no other way.”

“Hill captured one, this morning,” Lakeisha said. “I was just coming in to see if I could find out if Bucky could substantiate her claims that he knew her.”

Steve looked at her then, for the first time. “Really,” he said. 

“She was sending us weird messages on Barnes’s social media accounts, we thought might be code,” Lakeisha said. “But of course, it’s a lot more likely that she was just trying to get herself captured so she could infiltrate and do yet more damage to Barnes. But he’s in so much trouble maybe it’s worth the risk of seeing if she really does know anything.”

“Where is she,” Steve said. 

“With Hill,” Lakeisha said. Steve got to his feet, jaw set. 

“I can find out what she knows,” he said. 

“I, uh,” Lakeisha said, and she’d seen this face on Captain America before, usually in video footage right before he punched somebody really righteously. 

Steve was already dialing his phone. “Hill?” he said, putting the phone to his ear and striding purposefully away. 

Lakeisha climbed to her feet. Maybe she didn’t want to know how Captain America intended to get the truth out of the HYDRA lady. Maybe she should just… “I’m just gonna go take a peek at Barnes,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the door— JARVIS had told her this was where Bucky was, with Hawkeye and Steve guarding him. 

Steve glanced at her and nodded, continuing his pacing down the hall. He reached the elevator as Lakeisha stepped through the doors, and the doors closed behind both of them simultaneously, just in time to cut off Lakeisha’s loud shriek. 

Hawkeye was lying on the floor, slumped on one side, eyes not quite shut and face slack in unconsciousness— or death, she thought hysterically. There was, oh God, there was a bloody hypodermic needle on the floor next to him. Lakeisha didn’t have to know anything about the situation to know that this was bad and as a completely-physically-untrained young office worker who had only ever been in a couple of schoolyard fights and whose fighting tactics mostly consisted of clawing at faces and shrieking a lot, she had absolutely no business being in a room with anything that could knock out a world-class assassin and hand-to-hand fighter. 

She spun around and hit the door, but it didn’t open, and made a dull beeping noise that indicated that it was locked. “JARVIS,” she screamed, “let me outta here!”

“Oh _dear_ , Fraulein,” a totally unfamiliar voice said, “it seems you are out of your depth.”

She turned slowly, pressing her back against the door. Bucky was stalking slowly toward her with a bloody knife in his hand, shirtless, in bloody jeans— there was blood everywhere, and she realized in horror that it was his. He had a big bleeding stab wound at his right hip, and— there was a hunk of metal of some kind sticking out of it, gleaming through the blood. 

“Barnes,” she said, “oh God, Bucky.”

“Not anymore,” he said, and the smile that curved his mouth was not his.

His eyes, though, wide and blue and horrified— those _were_ his.

 

* * * 

 

“I can’t do goddamn brain surgery,” Tony said. 

“That’s what you have me for,” Dr. Asiyah Montazeri said, reassuringly competent. 

“But it’s,” Tony said, gesturing in frustration at the diagram, “it’s brain surgery and wiring all in one.”

“True,” Asiyah said. “True.” Her mouth pulled to one side, glasses reflecting the holographic lines. “I am familiar with the rudiments of electric circuitry but I am not nearly as confident in my wiring as I am in my surgical skills.”

“The rudiments,” Tony said. 

She gave him a sidelong smile. “I used to build radios,” she said. “But I daresay the radios of my childhood were far removed from this sort of work.”

“I can work with that, though,” Tony said. “That’s better than I thought. I knew I hired you for a reason.”

Asiyah laughed. “If I recall correctly, you did _not_ hire me, Pepper did. And it wasn’t for my long-ago amateur radio hobby but rather for my extensive C.V. since that time.”

“Well,” Tony said, “you make a good point. But the fact remains.” He enlarged the circuitry diagram and frowned at it. “JARVIS, buddy, you gotta help me with these acronyms.”

There was no answer. 

“JARVIS,” Tony said, with a flicker of annoyance that immediately froze and sank into cold terror in the pit of his stomach. “JARVIS, buddy, status.”

“That’s not good,” Asiyah said, turning her head warily. 

The holographic displays all fuzzed out and abruptly went green, streaks of bright green, and Tony  was already yanking out his phone and keying in the override, the isolation, cutting JARVIS off from the wider network, isolating and locking down the Tower and setting off the alarms. 

“Code 29,” Tony said, “lockdown, infiltration. JARVIS, report!” 

“I am afraid,” an unfamiliar voice said through JARVIS’s speakers, thin and reedy and heavily accented, “that he is presently indisposed. Young Anthony Stark, what a delight to make your acquaintance.” 

“You’re isolated and locked down,” Tony said calmly, “and you’ve got about a minute before you get deleted, so if you’ve got any grandiose proclamations to make you better make ‘em quick.”

“I am not an Internet virus,” the voice said, smug and satisfied, “so your protocols are no use here. I am not a virus at all, Stark.”

“No, huh,” Tony said, busy on his phone, “I see that. Kinda figured you weren’t, you don’t expect I’d have trouble with Internet viruses, do you? Then again, if you’re who I think you are, you’re a million years old so I don’t figure you really know me all that well.”

“I know plenty,” the voice said. 

“So make your grandiose announcement,” Tony said, “I’ve already started deleting you.”

“Delete all you like,” the voice said, “it barely slows me down. You cannot delete my primary copy, and my upload is fast enough to replace anything you remove nearly instantaneously.”

“Oh,” Tony said, “oh, I know who you are. Okay. Hey there, Zola. I’ve heard a lot about you but you know what, no good things. None at all.”

The voice chuckled, an eerie synthesized sound. “I have heard a great deal about you as well, and you know, you share many of the same weaknesses as your father without any of the endearing qualities that nearly redeemed him.”

“Nice,” Tony said, “well, you’re locked out of… hmm, pretty much everything, so… and aha, there’s your source of infiltration. Ah. The lab Barnes was in.” He was speaking out loud more for Asiyah’s benefit than anyone else’s; he glanced over at her and her face was set, determined. “I assume  you made him jack you in. Hm. Rogers and Barton were guarding you, I see Rogers is up and moving…” He looked up from his phone at the green holo display, which had resolved into a rather crude graphic of a bespectacled round face. “Did you kill Hawkeye? Because you know, I’ve only got two of those, it would be really stupid of you to have killed Hawkeye.”

“The operative who was guarding me? He is probably dead by now, yes,” Zola said, unconcerned. 

“You killed your hostage, idiot,” Tony muttered. 

“Oh, no, I have a hostage,” Zola said, and one of the holographic displays came up, showing the face of— God damn it, it was a video feed, probably live, and there was that brilliant young thing Pepper had headhunted away from a convenience store night shift after the girl had made a viral meme out of Tony’s fast food habits. 

“Aw shit,” Tony said. “That’s my favorite PR girl.” She was standing pressed against the lab door, staring in frozen terror at something off-screen. She was a firecracker, and no slouch in the brains department, but she had no training or experience in crises, and absolutely could not be expected to withstand either a brainwashed assassin or the artificial intelligence of a Nazi scientist genius sociopath, separately or in combination. God damn it.

“That’s Lakeisha Adams, isn’t it,” Asiyah said, her voice low with distress. 

“It sure is,” Tony said. 

“She has a little child at home,” Asiyah said, “he mustn’t hurt her!”

“I’m aware,” Tony said. He didn’t remember the kid’s name but he knew Steve had a picture of the kid in a Captain America t-shirt on his phone. 

“Then it is in your best interests to perhaps listen to my suggestions,” Zola said, and the screens went dark except for the video feed of Lakeisha standing with her back pressed against the door staring fixedly at something the camera couldn’t see. A tear slid down her face slowly, and Tony grimaced. 

Hill called him; her phone was independent from JARVIS, too. Not everyone’s was. Lakeisha’s wasn’t. Tony wondered if she had it, if he could get to it from here, what good that could possibly do. “What’s the lockdown?” she asked. “Code 29, infiltration, what’s the source?”

“Well,” Tony said, “I don’t know if you’ve been briefed, but…”

“Is it anything to do with an AI of Arnim Zola?” Hill asked. “I was in the middle of interrogating a prisoner who was insisting an infiltration was imminent, and when the lockdown started she looked resigned and said she was too late.”

“It is, in fact, Arnim Zola,” Tony said. “Very good. Barnes is the source, he’s apparently been stuck with this guy from day one.”

“Damn it,” Hill said, “then a lot of what she’s saying is probably true, and we’re kind of hosed.”

“Ask her about the Mechtat Project,” Tony said, “and if she gives you any answers about dream manipulation or virtual training, bring her up to me.”

“Roger that,” Hill said, which made a connection in Tony’s brain.

“Is Rogers with you?” Tony asked. 

“Yes,” Hill said, “he just stalked in here as the lockdown started, why?”

“Just trying to figure out where everybody is,” Tony said. “Can I talk to him?”

There was a shuffle, then Rogers said, “Stark, what’s going on?”

“JARVIS is compromised,” Stark said, “Zola’s in him. He managed to get Bucky to plug him into something.”

“Shit!” Rogers sounded astonished. “Bucky was out, though, he was completely— unconscious, and restrained, and— shit. Shit, Tony, I left him alone with Hawkeye.”

“Which was a fair call,” Tony said, “but clearly, Zola found a way.”

“I gotta get back there,” Rogers said. 

“You gotta hang on a minute,” Tony said. “I got eyes in that room because Zola’s showing me. He’s got a hostage.”

“Oh fuck,” Rogers said. “Oh, oh fuck, is it Lakeisha?”

“It is,” Tony said. “He hasn’t hurt her.”

“Where’s Clint?” 

“I don’t know,” Tony said. 

“I bet he’s locked down that room, then?” Rogers said. “I assume.”

“You are probably correct,” Tony said. “I’ve locked him out of most of the things JARVIS could access, but he’s probably going to try to circumvent that, so it’s probably not a good idea to run over there just yet. I need to figure out where Bucky plugged him in and isolate that so I can scrub him out of JARVIS’s systems.”

“Probably in that room,” Rogers said. “I only just walked away, he hasn’t been out of it.”

“Definitely in that room, then,” Tony said. “There are only a couple of network access ports in that room, I can shut those down remotely. Let me work on that, you help Hill and see if that prisoner’s got any info I can use.”

“All right,” Rogers said.

“We’ve got to get Lakeisha out of there,” Asiyah said. 

Tony nodded at her. Hill came back on the phone and said, “The prisoner got excited when I asked her about the Mechtat project and said she’s been researching it extensively and believes it to be possibly the only way to root Zola out at the source. I asked her if she had any information and she told me it was a virtual training environment used for many years by Department X, which was not exactly allied with HYDRA but was not exactly against it either. She claims to know a great deal about how to use the machine. But Tony, I can’t get a read on her, I can’t tell if she’s just here to hammer nails into Barnes’s coffin or what. She was expecting us to arrest her, it reeked of a trap.”

“Well,” Tony said, “she’s not wrong, we’re hosed. Once Romanoff arrives we can see what she thinks, she was enroute when I last spoke to her.”

“Romanoff’s pretty good at interrogation,” Hill conceded. 

 

* * *

 

“Barnes, I know you’re still in there,” Lakeisha said. 

“Of course he is,” the mouth said, and the eyes pleaded. He was arm’s length away, knife in hand, and she could see the brutal healing scars of his recent surgeries, could see where his left arm was now carved away to nearly nothing and the socket for the new arm had begun to be constructed, smooth metal protruding from under the skin, criss-crossing under old scars and new. 

It looked like it hurt.

“Am I your hostage?” she asked. She didn’t mean for it to happen, but a tear ran down her face. 

“Yes,” not-Barnes said, “you’ll serve for the purpose.” 

She nodded tightly. “I left without saying goodbye to Jimmy this morning,” she said, and tears ran down from both eyes; she couldn’t stop. “I didn’t see him last night either, I got home after he was in bed. I didn’t say goodbye, Bucky.”

“Your kind are like animals,” not-Bucky hissed. “I am not concerned with your finer sentiments.”

Lakeisha blinked slowly. “Wow, okay. I know _that_ wasn’t you, Bucky,” she said. “Any doubts I might have had, that laid to rest pretty convincingly. Jesus, you really are a Nazi, huh?”

“Their goals were pedestrian,” not-Bucky sniffed. “They lacked imagination and vision.”

“Yeah well,” she said, “you categorically reject people based on race, you’re going to lack a lot of things, and I don’t see you doin’ much better, there, Champ.”

“There are aspects of value in some humans,” not-Bucky said peevishly, “but the vast majority of them are little better than cattle.”

“Yeah but you can’t tell by _looking_ which of them that’s gonna be,” Lakeisha said, and she’d felt this before, that bone-deep sick cold fury that came up every time someone said something stupid like _your kind_ , and it was the deepest, darkest, most fearless ancient part of her soul. “Fuck you, old man, and fuck you for doin’ this to Bucky, he’s a decent guy and he doesn’t deserve your shit.”

“Young lady, you don’t seem to understand the seriousness of the situation you are in,” not-Bucky said, amused but menacing. “And Sergeant Barnes is nothing like decent. If he has you thinking so, you’re the worst kind of gullible. You cannot imagine the ridiculous trash I have to put up with, coming out of his brain. The things he wants, the things he’s done— no, Fraulein, he is not a decent man.”

Lakeisha laughed bitterly; she was still crying, but she was shaking with anger more than fear, and part of her mind was noticing that the metal thing sticking out of Bucky wasn’t what had caused the injury. He had clearly been stabbed, and then the metal thing inserted. It was viscerally horrifying. “But you don’t belong in his body,” she said. “That’s the most indecent violation I’ve ever seen. You’re making him hurt himself, making him hurt people he cares about. That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”

“You are weak,” not-Bucky said, “and foolish, and do not share my vision. It is unsurprising. I am a genius, after all.”

“I’ve known a lot of geniuses,” Lakeisha said. “They usually lack common sense.” Her eyes were continually drawn to that gleam of metal sticking out of Barnes’s bloody hip. There just wasn’t any good reason for it to be there. 

“Common sense,” not-Bucky huffed. “Common sense!” He walked across the lab— even his body language was alien, decidedly not Barnes. He walked like a much smaller person, shorter strides, almost scurrying, slouchy and hunched, with none of the self-possession Barnes normally had, none of the awareness of space taken up or the nonchalant head-tilt of an attractive person who had learned to use it. “Common sense is for the common. I assure you, I see plenty of possible outcomes and have taken into account all possibilities of countermeasures.”

“I doubt that,” Lakeisha said. “I really do. For one, you think Barnes is done resisting you?”

“I am intimately acquainted with Sergeant Barnes,” not-Bucky said almost wearily, paging through one of Stark’s holographic displays. “I am familiar with all of his methods of resistance, to the point of tedium. He is finished, Fraulein, I have worn him away and there is nothing left.”

“Is that so,” Lakeisha said. She could see the cameras in the ceiling, and was watching them. One was trained on her. She peeled herself away from the door and edged sideways, and it followed her. She could see on the holographic display that the camera’s feed was displayed there. “Did you do the same thing to JARVIS?” she asked. 

“He was interesting,” not-Bucky said, “but I needed the space so I erased him, mostly. Some of his protocols have been fascinating.”

“Did you get all Stark’s databases?” she asked. 

“I got enough,” not-Bucky said. That was a lie, she knew it; she knew the protocols, recognized from the colored border on the holographic display that Stark himself had called a Code 29, and that meant the databases were locked down and purged. JARVIS self-destructed during a Code 29 and would have to be restored from isolated remote backups. Not-Bucky— Zola?— had no more deleted JARVIS than he had burned down the building. He had simply triggered the self-destruct and locked himself out of any system that could be automated. 

Which meant Stark knew what was happening, and almost definitely knew she was here. She looked up at the camera and waved, managing a smile. “So you know from that database that I’m diabetic, right?” she said. “You know I need a shot in like 45 minutes or I’m gonna pass out and maybe die, right?”

Not-Bucky turned and looked at her, and Lakeisha kept her face straight. “Barnes didn’t know that,” not-Bucky said. 

“The database sure did,” she said. “Bucky wouldn’t know that, he’s never spent that long with me.”

“I am not greatly concerned with the frailties of human flesh,” not-Bucky said, turning back to his holo-screen, but she could clearly see the display where it said ACCESS DENIED as he tried to key into something. Also, he wasn’t using the one-handed keyboard JARVIS had set up for Bucky. Instead he was cumbersomely picking his way one-handed through a normal keyboard layout. 

Not an accomplished computer user. Bucky was better than that. 

Some genius. 

“Well,” Lakeisha said, “this frail human flesh over here is your hostage, and since Stark has access to a real live human resources director who knows about my condition, they’re gonna know that if they don’t get me out within like an hour they’re better off forgetting about me. So, there’s that. Maybe if you start now you can get them to trade me for somebody robust but stupid. That’d suit your needs better anyway.”

“You suit my needs just fine,” not-Barnes said. “Barnes is fond of you, that makes it better. He’s not a very good person, I don’t think this would bother him nearly as much if it were some stranger.”

Lakeisha thought about the way Barnes had deliriously insisted on making a video apologizing for killing his captors, the way he had, still bleeding, brokenly informed Steve that the one who had shot him was “nice”, and said, “I don’t think your intimate acquaintance with Barnes has really given you that much insight into him.”

 

* * * 

 

Steve couldn’t follow any of what Tony was doing. With the holographic displays he mostly just got dizzy too but at least he had some context. With Tony working furiously on his phone, there were no clues whatsoever. All he knew was that Tony was cursing, and on the video feed, Lakeisha was speaking earnestly but inaudibly. 

“It’s a problem,” Tony said, and finally he seemed to actually be speaking to Steve rather than past him. 

“Tell me the problem,” Steve said, “in words I understand.” 

Tony shook his head. “The source of the infiltration is in that lab,” he said, “the place where Barnes uploaded Zola, but shutting down the network access ports in there hasn’t disconnected it. I can’t figure out where the actual access point is.”

Steve blinked. “Is it wireless, maybe?” He had a rudimentary understanding at best of how wifi worked, but surely this was relevant. 

Tony stared at him. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Rogers, it could well be. You’re better at this than you let on.”

“I let on plenty,” Steve said, frustrated, but Tony had dived back in and was absorbed completely in his phone. 

“Bingo,” Tony said, but then went silent, and Steve thought he might vibrate out of his skin waiting for Tony to explain. “Damn it,” Tony said finally, and that was worse. Eventually Tony looked up and said, “He’s protected the nearest wifi receiver, I’d have to take out my own access to get it down, and then I wouldn’t be able to engage any of my countermeasures.”

“Ah,” Steve said. He fidgeted. “So I should go bust into that lab and take him down myself.”

Tony looked up from his phone, considering. “Maybe,” he said. 

 

* * * 

 

“No, no,” Hill was saying, “whatever Romanoff has, let her bring it in, you know she has unfettered access.”

Natasha grinned, and keyed her headset. “Hey Maria,” she said. “I brought you presents. Who broke JARVIS?”

“Zola did,” Hill said, and Natasha’s grin vanished immediately. 

“Well,” she said, “fuck. What’s the plan?”

“I need you to tell me whether this woman is telling the truth or not. Twenty-fourth floor. Elevators are working but on manual.”

“Good,” Natasha said, “some of this equipment is pretty heavy.” She traded looks with Yelena, who was still fitting her earpiece in, obviously unused to Starktech equipment. “Looks like we’re just in time.”

“I hope so,” Yelena said, coolly amused. “I hate to be too late but there’s an art to not being too early either.”

“If the party starts after you walk in people tend to think you brought it with you,” Natasha said. They piled equipment into the elevator and she watched the operator, a young Stark technical employee, using the manual bypass terminal inexpertly but effectively. It was crude, but it worked. 

“Here’s the sitrep,” Hill said, wasting no time on greetings. “Zola’s apparently been in Bucky this whole time. Steve and Clint were guarding him and he was sedated and restrained, and Steve stepped out for a minute and apparently Zola got Bucky up, overpowered Clint, and locked down the room with Lakeisha from PR inside.”

“Aw shit,” Natasha said. She liked that girl but there was no way anybody’d taught that girl anything beyond maybe throwing a punch.

“He’s got her hostage in that room and we can’t get eyes on it except the one security camera, which he’s feeding to us. The access point for Zola’s infiltration is in that room but is not any of the hard-wired network ports; Tony’s managed to figure out that he’s using something wirelessly and has it set up in such a way that Tony can’t take his access down without taking himself out as well.” Hill was gesturing at a drawing on an actual piece of paper with actual markers, and it was the lowest-tech thing Natasha had ever seen anyone do in Stark Tower. 

“Sounds like a problem,” Yelena said. 

“Who is this?” Hill asked, not unfriendly; she’d assumed Yelena was here with Natasha, then. This evidence of trust shouldn’t have warmed Natasha, but did.

“This is the Black Widow,” Natasha said. Hill actually blinked. 

“Is that so,” Hill said. 

“Yelena Belova,” Yelena said, offering her hand to shake, and giving Hill a flirtatious head-tilt. Natasha knew Hill wasn’t bisexual, wasn’t a lesbian, but she still looked a little stunned. Yelena had that effect regardless. When she wanted to. 

“Maria Hill,” Hill came back. “Head of security.” She looked at Natasha, then back at Yelena. “Black Widow, huh?”

“We are the last,” Yelena said. Her English was slightly British-accented, not at all Russian. 

“Barnes overpowered Clint?” Natasha asked. “Do we know what condition Clint is in, or where?”

Hill shook her head. “Zola claimed Clint was, quote, probably dead, unquote, but we have no further information. He wasn’t wearing a comm.”

Natasha nodded thoughtfully. “We have to get in that room,” she said. 

“We also have to find out if this HYDRA prisoner is here to help us or if her surrender was a ploy,” Hill said. “I was sort of hoping you could help with that. You have better interrogation skills than I do.” 

Natasha looked at Yelena, who gave her a shrug and a half-smile. Natasha grinned, and looked back at Maria. “Yelena is better at interrogation than I am. Fill her in, and I will go with Steve and see what we can do about removing Zola’s access point.”

 

* * * 

 

“You’re not makin’ great progress over there,” Lakeisha said to not-Bucky. She’d surreptitiously tried to get into her phone but it was locked out of everything— evidently it was part of JARVIS’s self-destruction. She knew she had everything backed up, but not having it usable was slowly killing her. She’d slid over to the edge of the camera’s range, slowly, and was sitting on the floor; she’d taken the phone out of the case and pulled the battery to force a restart, and was watching the camera watch her as it started up. 

“Neither are you,” not-Bucky said absently. 

“Well,” she said, “since my job is hostage, I’m doing it just fine thanks. But your job is supervillain and you’re supposed to be getting somewhere.” 

“I will get what I want,” not-Bucky said. “Stark cannot terminate my access without taking himself entirely off the grid. If he does that, I can recover faster than he can, and he cannot lock me out. It is only a matter of time.”

There were signs of life from her phone, and Lakeisha watched with interest as it went blank and then came up with a command prompt she hadn’t seen before. “Use Stark private network.” She glanced up at the camera, then over at not-Bucky. 

He had not reacted. The camera feed was on his screen but he wasn’t really looking at it. She realized then that he must have the camera feed playing somewhere Stark could see it. Stark knew she was here and knew she had her phone. 

She selected the Stark private network and it led her to an interface she hadn’t seen before. A message popped up, from a blank sender, and said “look up at the camera so I can tell if the feed is live.”

“Aye aye sir,” she wrote back, and looked up. The camera was impassive, unmoved. She looked back down and wrote, “I’m going to wave now,” and as she hit send, looked back up and waved. 

Not-Bucky still wasn’t looking at the camera feed. Good. 

“I knew I liked you,” the blank sender wrote, and she knew it was Stark. “Cap and Romanoff are going to try to get into that room.”

“Good,” she wrote back. “Bucky’s still in there but he can’t get control back.”

“I need to disable his network connection,” Tony wrote, “but I can’t find it. Do you see a device that he could be using wirelessly to connect?”

“No,” she wrote, but she had a terrible inkling. A piece of metal that didn’t belong. 

“He’s not plugged in, I disabled all the plug-in jacks,” Tony wrote. “It could be very small.”

“I have a possibility,” she wrote back. 

“If you can get at the device, whatever it is,” Tony wrote, “then I could unlock the doors. Unfortunately that’s a secure lab, there’s no easy way for Cap and Widow to bypass.” 

“Bummer,” she wrote, and thought about it. Zola wasn’t a fighter, and his control of Bucky’s body wasn’t that great. If he didn’t have a weapon, it wasn’t that she could take him but he probably couldn’t immediately kill her. 

“I’m not asking you to fight him,” Tony wrote. “You have no training for that. I would rather you not engage him. But if you can distract him, or draw him out, and find out what he’s using to connect, that would be enormously helpful so we could get you out of there.”

“I told him I was diabetic,” Lakeisha sent, “and that I’m gonna die in half an hour, but it didn’t seem to work.”

“Oo good try,” Tony wrote. “Seriously though. Does Barnes have his phone? It could be through his phone, if he’d modded it.”

“No,” Lakeisha wrote back. “I think… this sounds weird but I think he’s got the device literally plugged into Barnes’s body.”

“Not implausible,” Tony wrote back. “Barnes has a lot of cybernetic circuitry in him.”

“It’s fuckin’ gross,” she wrote. “Looks like he just stabbed himself a couple times and jammed a piece of metal into the stab wound.”

“That’s disturbing,” Tony wrote back. “Well, then, I don’t expect you to shut that down. Sit tight and try to stay out of his reach. Hey, is Barton in there?”

“Yes,” Lakeisha wrote. Hawkeye was still lying where he’d been left, but she could see his shoulders moving slightly. “Unconscious but breathing. Think he got drugged, there’s a hypodermic on the floor near him.”

“Good to know,” Tony answered. “Thanks.”

So that was what the metal thing was. A transmitter. Plugged into, ugh, cybernetic circuitry. Ugh. Lakeisha wasn’t much of an electronic engineer; she could hack software things sometimes, but she was absolutely not a hardware geek. “Could you fry the transmitter somehow?” she wrote.

“Not without stopping Barnes’s heart, probably permanently,” Tony wrote back. “He’s got a whole lot of metal in him, he’s a lot more robot than he looks.” 

“Well,” she wrote, “shit.” If Steve and Natasha— Natasha was back, that was good— couldn’t get in without the door getting unlocked, she was probably going to have to do something after all. She shook her head at herself. Lakeisha Adams, Action Hero. “Hey, if I get killed, my kid is set for life, right?”

“Christ almighty,” Tony wrote back, “don’t do that. That’s an order, Adams, don’t get killed.”

“I just wondered,” she wrote. “I didn’t tell him I loved him this morning, so it’s like, extra-poignant.”

“Adams,” Tony wrote, “don’t do anything stupid, I will get you out of there. Don’t put that on me.”

Enough of that, she was only distracting the only person who had any ability to fix the damage Zola had done to JARVIS and the tower. She put the phone back into her pocket and pushed to her feet. “Man,” she said, “I really need to pee.”

“Then do so,” not-Bucky said, contemptuous. 

“I’m not gonna just do it right here,” she said. “Jeez man. Maybe my kind are like animals but we’re at least the kind of animals that don’t just piss everywhere.”

“I do not care where you relieve yourself,” not-Bucky said. “You have the freedom of the room. Pick a corner that offends your sensibilities least.”

“Not if the camera’s gonna follow me around,” she said. “That’s creepy and gross.”

“I am not much concerned with that,” not-Bucky said. “The choice is yours. Exercise your human free will.”

He had put the knife down so he could type; he’d had to. Bucky only had the one hand, after all. “Why didn’t you wait to do this until Bucky got his new arm?” Lakeisha asked. “It was gonna be pretty soon.”

“My hand was forced,” not-Bucky said. “It is a shame; with the arm, Barnes could defeat Captain Rogers in hand-to-hand, which would have been an excellent advantage to have. But I will have to make do.”

“Really,” Lakeisha said, coming closer. If she could grab the knife first she… well, she had no idea how to knife fight. But she could keep him from using it on her, at least. She didn’t think she could bring herself to stab Bucky. 

“He is attempting to enter through the ventilation ducts,” not-Bucky said. “Which is perfect. He can’t fit, he’ll have no maneuverability, and I can easily trap him and electrocute him.”

“Would that really kill him?” Lakeisha asked, stepping backward. He had several camera feeds up, and sure enough, Steve was in a corner of the screen prying the cover off a ventilation shaft.

“I don’t know,” not-Barnes said, “but he would be stuck there and heavily damaged, which suits my needs well enough.”

Lakeisha kicked around the room aimlessly, until she was in a corner where no camera could turn to reach her. She pretended to be looking for a bucket, and one-handedly typed to Tony “he’s gonna electrocute Steve in the vent don’t let him go in there”. 

She got a silent reply, “thanks,” and put her phone away. 

“Forget it,” she said, “I’m just gonna hold it, but I warn you, it’s gonna be real messy if you kill me.”

“Killing people is always messy,” not-Bucky said. “Barnes knows that well. He has killed an awful lot of people, you know.”

“I’m aware,” Lakeisha said. If she just snuck up on him and yanked the transmitter out what would happen? She edged closer, watching what he was typing. He was in some sort of command interface, and she couldn’t follow any of the commands. He was badly slowed down by having only one hand, however. 

In one of the camera feeds, Steve Rogers was using a sledgehammer on a wall panel. There were other cameras panning frantically after flickers of movement, but none of them had Natasha in view. Others showed frightened Stark employees huddled in hallways, customers in the lobby, a security guard carefully escorting people out one by one through an emergency exit after passing them under a scanner. The sidewalk had a small crowd on it, some identifiably reporters, and a few cop cars.

“Man,” Lakeisha said, “if you don’t kill me I’m going to have so much goddamn work to do tomorrow, you don’t even know.”

“You truly do not understand the situation you are in,” not-Bucky said peevishly, swinging to give her a look. 

“Oh,” she said, “I do, but I’ve spent most of my life mired in bullshit, I could be a lot more scared of it than I am. You don’t know a whole lot about what it’s like to be a black teen mom in America if you think this is the worst way I know I could die.”

“You are an idiot,” not-Bucky said, and turned back and entered a command. Onscreen, Steve Rogers jerked and flailed back as a spark shot out of the conduit he’d had his hand on. 

“Shit,” Lakeisha said, and not-Bucky’s body jerked— Bucky was trying to take back control. He staggered away from the terminal, flailed wildly, and grabbed at a large freestanding tool of some kind, maybe a drill press, pulling it down— onto himself. 

“Oh my God,” Lakeisha shrieked, jumping backward out of the way of the object. It knocked Bucky down and fell across him, pinning his right arm down under it, and he made a horrible noise. 

She yanked her phone out and texted Stark “Bucky just took himself out”, before approaching cautiously. “Barnes,” she said. “Or— whoever.”

Bucky’s eyes rolled open, and he looked over at her, expression stricken. “Lakeisha,” he said. “Help me.” It was Bucky’s voice again, his accent.

“I don’t know if I can get that thing off you,” she said. 

“No,” he said. “Don’t. Don’t get it off me. Go and get the knife.”

“The knife,” she said, turning to look. It had been left on the workbench next to the holographic terminal. 

“Get it,” Bucky rasped. “Need you to—“

“I got it,” she said, coming back over to him. Her phone buzzed and she looked at it.

“Wifi transmitter still active,” Tony wrote, “Zola still in control.”

“Knife,” Bucky said. “I need you to— push it in,” and he tilted his head, offering her the space under his jaw. 

Lakeisha froze. “You— where?”

“Right under the jaw,” Bucky said, wild-eyed; he’d gone very pale. “On the side. Get the artery.”

She’d assumed he was telling her how to get the transmitter out. “That’ll kill you,” she said. 

“Yes,” he said fiercely. “I need you to!”

“I don’t have to kill you to get the transmitter out,” she said. 

“I’m the transmitter,” Bucky said. “It’s— my spine is the antenna. Zola’s on a chip in my brain. My heart generates the electricity. Stop my heart, you shut it down, you stop this, you end this.”

“I can just pull the thing out,” she said. “Let’s try that first, Barnes.”

“No,” he said, nearly crying, “no, you need— end this, God, _end_ this. He’s in JARVIS, he’s killing Steve, he’ll kill Tony, he’ll kill you— _end_ this.”

He wasn’t badly injured under that drill press thing, she judged— it might have broken his arm, maybe his leg, but his torso wasn’t crushed. She could reach his hip if she wriggled her arm underneath. She got down on her knees. 

“Please,” he said, tilting his head back, “don’t— don’t make me do this anymore, he’s fighting to take me back and I don’t, I don’t want—“ He was crying now, frantic. 

Lakeisha put the knife down behind herself, out of his reach even if he got his arm free, and put her hand in the middle of his chest. “Bucky,” she said softly. “I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. Let me try this first.”

His right hip was a bloody mess, but she set her teeth in her lower lip and slid her other hand over into the narrow space between his body and the heavy crossbar, feeling his hot sticky blood, the slippery texture where his skin parted. “Please,” he breathed, eyes squeezed shut. 

“I owe you at least the attempt,” Lakeisha said. “This’ll probably hurt, hang on.” She found the hard sharpness of metal and wrapped her fingers in it and pulled. Nothing happened, so she pulled harder, and he made an awful little noise. 

“Pull straight,” he gasped, “straight up, the pins are in— sockets— _nngh_.”

She got as much leverage as she could and yanked straight up, curling her fingers and bracing the heel of her hand against the bloody mess of his injury. He bit down on a horrible noise, and it suddenly gave, coming loose and thwacking her knuckles into the heavy machine crossbar. 

“Oh my God,” she said, turning her head away to gag; there was so much blood, slippery under both hands, and she crawled backward, pulling the transmitter out— it was trailing bloody tissue or wires or both, and Bucky’s chest moved under her hand, cold and sweaty. 

She gagged again, sitting back on her heels and dropping the thing on the floor next to the discarded knife. “Oh my God, Bucky,” she said, swallowing hard against the urge to vomit. Some of those things were wires. 

“Make it stop,” Bucky pleaded, “he’s, help, please, God—“ His head tipped back and he writhed, screaming. It was horrible. 

Lakeisha wiped her shaking hands on her jeans and picked up her phone. “Pulled transmitter out of his body,” she wrote, “blood everywhere, he says his spine is the antenna and I need to stop his heart to stop transmission, tell me that’s not true.”

There was a loud beep from the terminal, and JARVIS, identifiably JARVIS, said, “Hostile source isolated, containment protocol deployed.”

Lakeisha’s phone buzzed. “Don’t kill him,” Tony wrote back, “he’s wrong.”

There was a loud click and Steve Rogers burst through the lab door shield-first. “Oh God,” he said, and skidded to a stop, staring at Lakeisha. She realized she was covered in blood. 

“It’s all his,” she said, “help him.”

Bucky screamed again. “Make it stop,” he begged, “make it stop.” 

“It worked,” she said, “Bucky, it worked, the transmitter shut down, he can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, sliding in next to Lakeisha and easily heaving the fallen machine off of Bucky. “Bucky! It’s okay, Bucky, it’s okay now.”

Bucky screamed and thrashed, and Steve whipped his t-shirt off and pressed it against the bleeding hole in Bucky’s hip. “Make it stop,” Bucky sobbed. “Make it stop.”

“I got you,” Steve said, “Bucky, I got you.”

Natasha came in and paused to check Hawkeye’s pulse. She frowned, stood up, went over to the table where Bucky had been restrained before, and came over with a syringe. She pushed it into the deltoid muscle of his right arm and he stared blankly at her, going still, then went limp, breathing hard but motionless, eyes open but blank. 

“Zola’s still in there,” she said, “but he’s not out here anymore.” 

“I pulled that out of him,” Lakeisha said, pointing at the thing lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Natasha poked at it with her toe. 

“He’s bleeding pretty bad,” Steve said. 

“He’ll be all right,” Natasha said. “He needs to stay under.” She pushed her shoulder against her ear and said, “Hill, I need the machinery brought up, is Yelena done with the prisoner?”

Lakeisha pulled her phone back out, realizing her hands were both sticky and shaking. Was she going to cry? That was stupid, it was over now. But the tears came anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said, rolling his head toward her. “Lakeisha. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t hurt me,” she said thickly. “I’m fine.”

“Don’t cry,” he said. 

“Hey,” she said, remembering something, “I came in here to ask you something— do you know a technician named Regina Wells?”

“Wells,” Bucky said. His face was blank, he was obviously doped to the gills, and his answer probably wasn’t going to be worth much, but the question was the sole reason Lakeisha had gotten into this mess anyway. “Regina… oh! Yes.” He blinked. “When I first— went rogue. I got her to fix my arm. She thought I was a robot. I promised not to kill her. She didn’t believe I knew what a promise was.”

“She thought you were a robot,” Lakeisha said.

“Yeah,” he said, trailing off. Steve still was applying pressure with his shirt and both hands, and he gave Lakeisha a sharp look. “Yeah, she… was kinda horrified when I told her I had been a person once. Didn’t believe me.” He rolled his head back toward Steve. “I didn’t kill her. Figured there was no point. And she did fix my arm as best she could. Got me six more months of use out of it.” He sighed, and blinked up at the ceiling. “Zola’s going to copy himself over,” he went in a moment. “He told me I’ll never be able to remove all the copies of him. He’ll always be there waiting for a chance to take over.”

“We’ll get him out, Bucky,” Steve said. 

“You can’t,” Bucky said, struggling to get the last word out before the sedatives pulled him under. 

Lakeisha sat numbly, tears streaming, phone in one sticky hand, staring at Barnes’s rolled-back eyes. “Jesus Christ,” she said, and wiped her face with the back of her less-bloody wrist. “This fucking job.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Excerpt from Lady Augusta Gregory's _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ , published in 1902. It deals with the famous incident of the Combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain at the Ford, from the Ulster myth-cycle. (If you would like to read a translation I would suggest, for greater poetic and academic veracity, Thomas Kinsella's translation, which is simply titled _Tain_ , but Lady Gregory was culturally very significant and if you like some Bowdlerization of your myths, and a lot of florid Victorianicity, you could do a lot worse; her work is charming and had a profound effect on early 20th C. Irish nationalism.)
> 
>  
> 
> It gets worse before it gets better but I promise next chapter will be super awesome.


	15. Glitch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're going to try to use a virtual reality training simulator to separate Zola from Bucky's consciousness. Natasha has a plan, but Steve's kind of good at wrecking plans.  
> It descends into smut for a while there. What's the opposite of a size-difference kink?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the unintentional hiatus-- turns out when you travel a bunch over the holidays and forget your computer at one of the locations you visited, it's kind of hard to get much writing done.

Steve stood by the gurney they’d fastened Bucky to, arms crossed, not making much of an attempt not to look belligerent. Dr. Montazeri had finished stitching Bucky up, unexpectedly emotional about it, and was fussing over his IV. Steve gave her a questioning look, and she quietly said, “Mostly saline, a unit of blood, a painkiller, and just enough sedative to keep him from waking. I would give him antibiotics but I do not think they do him any good.”

Steve shook his head. “Thanks,” he said, and she peeled her glove off and patted his arm.

“Steve,” she said quietly, solemnly. 

“Lakeisha’s okay, right?” Steve asked. 

“She is fine,” Dr. Montazeri answered. “She wasn’t hurt at all.”

“Yeah but,” Steve said, and couldn’t continue. “Clint?”

“He’ll be out a few more hours,” the doctor answered, “but as I said initially, he didn’t get a whole dose, he’ll be all right.” 

Steve nodded tightly. “Good,” he said. “Good.” 

“It’s all right,” she said. “We’re past the worst and we’ve been lucky.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. Past the worst. Right. He kept thinking that, and then something even worse would happen, so he’d believe that approximately never. 

The room was in upheaval around them, as Natasha and her mysterious blonde friend worked with Stark on setting up some esoteric machinery. The HYDRA prisoner was with them, and Steve couldn’t keep from staring at her, couldn’t find the strength to keep his suspicion off his face. She was a middle-aged woman, unexceptional except for the keenness of her eyes, and despite the fact that Natasha and Hill both appeared to be satisfied with her sincerity, Steve couldn’t forget that she was part of the machinery that had done this to Bucky in the first place. 

“Don’t eat her,” Tony said, clapping Steve on the shoulder. 

“If this is a trap I’ll kill her myself,” Steve said, not moving his eyes from their fixed stare. 

“Easy there, Papa Bear,” Tony said. “I’ve already got about six dozen kill switches built in here, she won’t live long enough for you to kill her if it turns out there’s anything off about this.”

“Yeah, from out here,” Steve said. And privately, he rather thought Tony had his hands full already rebuilding JARVIS and getting his precious tower back online, but he wasn’t going to say it, there was nothing more counterproductive than questioning Tony’s ability to multitask. 

“You think Romanoff is going to let anything shady happen?” Tony asked. “Should I tell her you doubt her? Because she’s kind of… well, in front of that friend of hers, she’s kind of even more terrifying than normal. It’s like, Black Widow squared, not doubled.”

“You’re not helping,” Steve said. “Get back to work and maybe I’ll be convinced.”

Tony wriggled his fingers midair. “Yes sir Captain sir!”

Steve didn’t take his eyes off the HYDRA agent to dignify him with the dirty look he deserved, and Tony retreated with some sort of incomprehensible gesture. 

The machine took form, expanded out of a series of suitcases Natasha and her friend had ferried in from parts unknown. Hill was supervising, glaring almost as much as Steve, and she eventually came over and said, “We did check her out, Cap.”

“He had his worst enemy living in his brain for at least a month,” Steve said, gaze unwavering. “And I spoke to him every day and, fuckin’, brushed his goddamn hair and still didn’t figure it out.” And didn’t notice that Bucky had been making out with him primarily to disgust Zola into retreating. That was more intimate than hair-brushing, and more purposeful, and Steve hadn’t fucking noticed. 

“None of us did,” Hill said. “Not even a super-advanced AI with sensors and things.” She shrugged. “No help for it. At least we have the technology to remove him, right?”

“We don’t know what that fucking machine does,” Steve gritted out. “Natasha’s not even sure. Tony can’t reverse-engineer it. We’re relying on a HYDRA agent who apparently _wanted_ you to take her in. Less than twelve hours ago.”

“Actually, fourteen hours,” Hill said. 

“Whatever,” Steve snapped, still staring at the agent. He had her memorized. He would know her anywhere, would know her blind, would know her from the corner of his eye, would be able to track her down anywhere she went.

Not that she likely had an escape plan, if she was a plant. It wasn’t like HYDRA had any shortage of agents willing to commit suicide for the cause. 

“We have to hook him up,” Natasha said, turning and coming toward them. 

The HYDRA agent turned and risked a glance Steve’s direction. He stared her down, and she cringed. “Can we actually draw power from the force of his glare?” she asked, mouth twisting wryly.

“I wouldn’t,” Natasha said. 

“If you hurt him,” Steve said, low and quiet and intense. 

The HYDRA agent held her hands up, palms outward. “I didn’t know,” she said, looking down at Bucky.

“Didn’t know _what_ ,” Steve said.

“I didn’t know he’d ever been human,” she said. 

Steve made his jaw un-grit enough to concede, “That’s what he said.”

Her eyes flicked up to his briefly, solemn but not hostile. “Well,” she said. “We were both told the same lies. And he said, it was my choice what to do with that knowledge.” She shrugged. “I decided to unravel them and see how far they went.” She gestured at the machine. “And here we are.”

“Here we are,” Steve echoed flatly, conceding nothing.

“Here we are and the first person to tell me the truth was him,” she said. “He made me a promise and kept it.” 

“Natasha,” the blonde woman said, then followed it up with rapid Russian Steve couldn’t follow. 

“ _Da_ ,” Natasha said absently, and turned, putting her fingertips on the HYDRA agent’s arm. “Wells. You said you knew how to hook this up.”

“I do,” the agent said, flicking one last glance at Steve and giving him another little shrug before moving away. 

The blonde watched Natasha and Wells with a sly, curving smile that seemed to be her default expression. Her eyes drifted over to Steve, took in his tense posture— they were touching Bucky, the HYDRA agent had touched Bucky’s chest— and her mouth curled up even more on one side. 

She was a couple of inches taller than Natasha, and wearing scarlet kitten heels with her impeccably fashionable tight jeans. Her hair was loose in blonde waves, her makeup the flawless kind that was calculated to look effortless. She came closer, looking down at Bucky, and darted her eyes up to catch Steve staring at her. 

“I like the haircut,” she said, gesturing to Bucky. “He looks better than when last I saw him.” Her English had a British accent, no trace of Russian in it.

“When did you last see him?” Steve asked. Clint had made a reference to another Black Widow, and he wondered if this could be her. 

The blonde gave him a wickedly-curving smile. “He was the Winter Soldier then,” she said. “And they weren’t maintaining him very well.” She stepped closer, doing that thing women did when they wanted to fluster you, twisting their hips aimlessly and shifting balance on their aggressively-sexy shoes; she came up next to the gurney, leaned a hip on it, and traced a finger along the side of Bucky’s face. 

“Don’t touch him,” Steve said, but made no move to stop her; she was teasing him. 

She glanced up at him, then back down at Bucky’s face, but pulled her hand away with a lingering touch along his jaw. “Such a waste,” she said, “shutting him away like that.” She turned her eyes up to Steve’s face. “Such a waste trying to keep such a bright mind blank.”

“You never knew him,” Steve said.

“No,” the blonde said, “not as a person. But Natasha and I are rather close. She’s… filled me in.” And there was absolutely something suggestive in the way she looked up under her lashes. 

“Has she now,” Steve said, sparing a fraction of a second to be glad he was too angry to get flustered. 

“In detail,” the blonde said. 

Natasha said something in Russian, then, and Steve watched the blonde’s expression go innocent, delighted, then deviate through mischief into coyness. He looked uncertainly over at Natasha, who looked— fond? He wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen Natasha genuinely look fond, so he couldn’t gauge it. 

“Steve,” Natasha said, “this is Yelena Belova, a friend from school.” She gave him a significant glance, and Steve thought about what little he knew of Natasha’s past, put it together with what Clint had said, and arrived at the conclusion that she was somehow referring to Black Widow school, which was a new one on him.

“I see,” he said. 

“Yelena, this is Steve Rogers,” Natasha said. 

“Captain America,” Yelena fairly purred. “I know.” She held out her hand to shake, and Steve did so, businesslike and crisp. She let her fingers linger in his, and looked him up and down in frank appreciation. “The man, the legend.” She turned her head and said something to Natasha, and Steve caught a word he recognized as being very crude and having to do with copulation. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Natasha said.

“Well,” Yelena said, “if anyone could handle that much man, Natalia,” and she gave Steve a frank up-and-down look.

“Yelena,” Natasha said, “your suspicion that when he blushes it’s spectacular is correct, but that’s not the way to get him to blush. We can work on it later. Maybe when the love of his life isn’t lying unconscious with Arnim fucking Zola in his head.”

“Oh- _ho_ ,” Yelena said. 

“It’s not,” Steve said, “that’s not,” but he was blank, not flustered. 

“Shame he won’t be coming in with us,” Yelena said. 

“In,” Steve said, giving her a puzzled look. 

“Into the machine,” Yelena said. “The— you haven’t been briefed. Forgive me. What have you been told of the Mechtat Project?”

“Nothing,” Steve said, shooting Natasha a glare, but Natasha was oblivious, staring at one of the holo-displays with the HYDRA agent. Steve took some comfort in the fact that the agent seemed not to be fluent in Russian, and they were hacking together a translation program; Natasha knew more of what was going on, then. It would be harder for the agent to mislead her. 

“Nothing at all,” Yelena said. Her eyebrows went up, and she glanced over at Natasha, then back at him. “You trust her, don’t you?”

“Natasha?” Steve said. “Yes.”

“Brilliant,” Yelena said, looking pleased. “Good for her.” 

Steve looked at Natasha, who smiled with her eyes lowered, watching Bucky. “Steve’s no fool,” she said. It still pinged his protective instincts a little when she gently stroked Bucky’s hair back from his face, but he managed to tamp it down. She thumbed away the tear-stains on his cheeks, and combed her fingers through his hair where it was tousled. “I know I will remember more once I’m in there,” Natasha said finally. “Part of it is they make you consciously forget when you come out, but I have enough scraps left to remember at least that much.”

“I don’t understand,” Steve said. 

“It’s a virtual training room,” Natasha said, looking up, and her fingers kept up their repetitive motion through Bucky’s hair. “You go in under light sedation, and while you are in there, you are presented with scenarios and are given packets of information that you can extract and, well, pretty much download, for want of a better word, while you’re under. You learn skills like languages, you get mission briefings, you can practice in a virtual environment like a dry run for a mission with convincing simulations of the responses you’ll face.”

“And you can get killed,” Yelena put in.

Natasha nodded. “You die for real,” she said, “if you fail, so it’s kind of, kind of high stakes. How it works, I don’t know, but I do know that much.”

“There are ways to cheat though,” Yelena said. Natasha gave her a look, and Yelena laughed. “Don’t give me that look, you taught them to me!”

“Did I,” Natasha said, contemplative, eyes going distant. She looked back down at Bucky, traced her fingers along his cheekbone. “Oh,” she said suddenly, “yes, I remember now.”

“What do you remember,” Steve asked, frustrated. He still didn’t really understand. 

Natasha sighed quietly, rubbing the backs of her fingers down the side of Bucky’s face, following the line of his square jaw. “He was there,” she said. “He’s been in there before. With me.” She looked up, over at Yelena, then smiled at Steve. “So… in that virtual environment, it will be easier for us to separate Zola out from Bucky. Those of us with organic brains will interact differently with the environment. It is also easier to manipulate the brainwashing and programming we underwent, from inside of this machine. It is why Yelena and I were both so eager to get our hands on it.”

“Could it be used on anyone?” Steve asked, frowning. 

“No,” Natasha said, trading looks with Yelena. “You have to be… there have to be some enhancements.”

“Would it work on me?” Steve asked. 

She flinched slightly. “It _might_ not kill you,” she said, grimacing. Then, more seriously, she added, “No, Steve. Don’t. You haven’t had your mind toyed with like this before; there’s no telling how you’d react. We’ve been in it before. The best thing you can do is stay on the outside where you can make sure nothing attacks our physical bodies.”

“Stark has that handled,” Steve said. 

“No,” Natasha said, and she was staring at him intently now, and he suddenly realized; she didn’t want to say she didn’t trust Tony, but she didn’t trust Tony. And Steve knew what she meant. It wasn’t that Tony would mean any harm. He just wasn’t always as on top of situations as he thought he was. 

He gritted his teeth. “All right,” he said. If only Sam were here. 

 

 

Natasha couldn’t look at Steve, couldn’t bear the way he was so clearly close to the end of his rope. She couldn’t really look at Bucky either. It was a nightmare, for both of them. 

And so she had to look at the machine instead. She didn’t want to think too hard about that either, wasn’t really eager to strap herself back into it. She more or less trusted Yelena to have her back in there, though after this was over she’d have to be wary for the inevitable betrayal. Yelena wasn’t going to hang around for Stark to get any kind of edge over her, and she was going to take whatever she could get and run with it as far and fast as she could at her first opportunity. 

It did make Natasha feel better to know that. 

But she didn’t have any kind of handle to suss out just what the AI would do in there. It was Zola, sure, but how much of him was it really? He wouldn’t have human motivations anymore, only a faded and incomplete copy of a genius madman. And a genius Zola had certainly been, but this was not Zola. It was a copy. She’d dealt with artificial intelligences before, and she was probably better at it than almost anyone, but she still wasn’t relishing the prospect of it in conjunction with the Mechtat environment. 

With the added unpredictability of an inexperienced operator. Between Wells and Stark, they would probably be able to make the thing work. But she’d known, before, what her handlers had been working toward, or at least she’d had pretty good criteria to work out a guess from. This, she was lost. There was no way to know what she’d face in there. 

At least once she was in there she’d remember more. She was certain by now that she’d been in there with Bucky before. Echoes kept floating up in her mind, fuzzy half-memories of interactions with him she was sure hadn’t taken place in the real world. 

It took exceptional focus to prepare herself, to let them lie her down on a table and attach the electrodes to her face, her head, her neck, her chest, inside her elbows— to apply the necessary restraints to keep herself from twitching out of the contacts and killing herself accidentally. Her body wanted her to panic, but she knew not to, she knew to breathe deep and slow and stay calm. 

The doctor put the IV in, and it helped, it helped _so much_ that the woman was wearing a peacock-blue chunky-knit cardigan and not a lab coat. The doctor gently took Natasha’s hand and said, “I know you’ll get him back.”

A little fuzzy as the sedative crawled its warm way through her limbs, Natasha blinked up at the woman and dredged up a half-smile. “I better,” she said. “I was used to him.”

She was sliding under when she heard a commotion of some kind, someone coming in— not shouting, but loud enthusiastic talking. Sam? Was Sam here? It sounded like his voice— but he’d said he couldn’t— she had things to tell him— But it was too late, she was going under, and after an abortive attempt at scrabbling back to consciousness, she let go. 

 

 

 

A shock of cold water, and Natasha struggled, remembered just in time not to gasp— it was always this way, chillingly familiar. She thrashed, held still a moment to let gravity tell her which way was up, and then kicked up to break the surface of the water. 

Yes. She remembered this place. She trod water a moment, looking for the ladder. It was a pool, a big swimming pool with Olympic-style lanes. She’d been dumped here many times; it led to the training facility. This was prep for missions when she’d need to rapidly acquire new skills. 

She remembered now. This was a virtual reality, in which any scenario could be input by the operators. Most importantly, time passed much faster in here than in the real world, meaning someone could spend weeks or months in here to practice something new, but only hours would pass in the real world. She hadn’t remembered that, but of course in here she did. 

She’d spent six months here on a long mission with Bucky, who hadn’t had a name then. They’d figured it was safe, she vaguely remembered, because without time to physically regenerate his brain, he wouldn’t be able to access memories. They hadn’t really understood, though, that he didn’t need his neural connections to regenerate his personality. Natasha had got to know a man who had a lot more depth to him than they’d allowed for. 

Not that you weren’t observed, in here. You were. The operators could observe what you were doing, though she had come to understand that the interface was rather crude— there were some things they just never caught. And there were usually periods when the interface went down, suspending the operatives inside in a non-world of varying degrees of unreality. She and Yelena had passed many hours amusing one another in that no-place with nothing but one another’s bodies. That, Natasha remembered now, was the real reason that none of the handlers had ever really caught on to the extent of their relationship; so much of it had never really occurred. 

She swam to the ladder and climbed out of the pool. She was naked, of course, had nothing— you never did. But there was a locker room at the far end of the pool room, and there would be equipment there. Unless it was a trap. Sometimes it was a trap. She remembered that. 

Her hair was in a long braid, a long wet braid. She hadn’t worn that style for years and years, but here it was. The style Bucky had commented on, when he’d been drugged. Yes, she knew now; she’d had long hair on that mission with him. 

That mission when they’d slept together, and he’d curled around her during a glitch and fallen asleep and woken up screaming— remembering that he’d had a name, that his name had been James. She’d kept the secret for another month of in-machine time, but it had slipped out of her in a bad moment, and they’d yanked him and wiped him. 

She remembered now.

And he was in here somewhere. 

She wrung out her braid and slung it over her shoulder, beginning to move toward the exit, when there was another splash from the pool. Oh right, Yelena. She frowned; Yelena should have been right after her. But, well, time moved slower here. 

Blond hair, dark with water, broke the surface, and a limb flailed, but Yelena seemed disoriented, and sank again, sputtering. Natasha realized she couldn’t breathe, wasn’t able to get herself properly to the surface— what was wrong with her? She’d done this as many times as Natasha, surely, her memories of it should have returned by now. 

Steeling herself, Natasha dived back in and swam to retrieve her. Yelena’s hands closed around her arm as she pulled her in toward her chest, and she hauled them both to the ladder and climbed out. Yelena clung to her, coughing and coughing, but managed to pull a breath in raggedly as Natasha set her down and stepped back and—

It wasn’t Yelena. It was a man. It was a skinny and small man, no taller than she was herself, with narrow shoulders and sharp features. He had his hands over his face as he coughed and coughed but it was unmistakable that he was male, diminutive as he was. 

“Who the hell are you,” Natasha said, backing away. He must be part of the training scenario. Or— she didn’t know what kind of effect the AI being in here would have, he could be an artifact of— 

He managed to take enough of a breath to speak. “Natasha,” he said, wheezing thinly as he looked up at her. He was still struggling to draw in tight wheezing breaths, curled in on himself, and the bones of his shoulders were sharp. 

She stared at him. Blue eyes, sharp face, straight nose with a little bump where it had been broken once, full mouth— 

“Steve?” she demanded, incredulous.

He breathed a moment, then gave her a familiar tight smile, resigned and sharp. “Yeah,” he said, and sucked in another breath. “This isn’t what I expected.” Beneath the hoarseness from coughing and the thinness from wheezing, his voice was the same, only from this smaller frame it was jarringly deep. 

“You,” she said, “I,” but she had no sentence to follow that up with. She’d completely forgotten he had ever been other than the way she’d known him. But this must be what he used to look like. He was getting his breathing under control with a resigned sort of practiced familiarity.

The thing about this place is that while it was convincing, it wasn’t quite as sharp as really being alive. It was hard to remember the real world when you were in here. So it took a moment for Natasha to punch through her distraction. 

“Steve!” she said, angry. “How the hell did you get in here? Yelena was supposed to come with me and you were supposed to watch our backs! Who’s out there now?”

Steve coughed again. “You don’t trust Yelena,” he said. “Not really. Why were you willing to come in here with her?”

“I could keep an eye on her in here,” Natasha said. “And I know I’ve been in here with her before. I don’t know you like this, Steve. You’re one more variable. And anything could happen out there!”

“Sam showed up,” Steve said. “And I trust him, so— I wanted to come with you. I made Yelena switch with me.” His chin jutted stubbornly. 

She threw up her hands. “The thing about any op is minimizing unknowns,” she said furiously. “You are an unknown, Steve. I knew I could rely on you to stay back and guard us with that HYDRA operative in the room. I knew Yelena would be able to handle this environment and anything unexpected that came up in it. Now I have Yelena, who I don’t trust with my unconscious body, and a HYDRA operative, and Sam, who hasn’t been briefed, and Tony, who I don’t ever trust to behave in predictable ways. And you, who I don’t know like this. I don’t know what you can do, Steve! I know you can’t break doors down, which is largely what you’re good for in real life, so what do we do now?”

Steve’s chin tucked down stubbornly, pointy and little, and his eyes narrowed. “We find Bucky,” he said, “and that’s one thing I know I can do no matter what.”

“If you die here you die for real,” Natasha spat. But she held out her hand, and he took it. He definitely weighed less than she did, and she could look him straight in the eye. 

“You know this place?” he asked. 

“I’ve been here many times,” she said. “Sometimes this is the starting point. Either this is a trap or there’s a locker room where we can get clothes and supplies.”

“Great,” he muttered, wrapping his arms around himself. He was so skinny, so frail-looking, all his ribs sticking out, no muscle on his frame. He wasn’t starved, but he didn’t look well-fed either. 

She knew Steve’s usual body so well, they’d worked together so much, and she was used to him, knew how he walked, knew that his hand could almost entirely circle her bicep. Now he was a spare framework of sharp bones and slim flesh, wiry and probably tougher than he looked but tiny nonetheless. 

He blushed at her regard, and squinted as he dug his finger in his right ear. “Five feet four inches,” he said. “Ninety-five pounds.”

“I have almost twenty pounds on you,” she said, incredulous. They were the same height; in her usual shoes she’d be taller.

“Deaf in my right ear,” he said glumly. “I was hoping it was just water. But no. It’s back.”

She waved him against the wall and ducked her head around the corner, peering into the locker room warily. Nothing moved. “Your vision all right?” she asked. She hadn’t known he’d been partly deaf. 

“No,” he said. “I’m night-blind and partly colorblind.”

“Good to know,” she said. “Well, you die in here, you die for real.” She grabbed his wrist and tugged him into the hallway, then peered around the door into the locker room. 

“Got it,” he said. “You wanna bet the heart defect’s back too?”

She looked back at him, appalled. “You had a heart defect?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, and rubbed at his bony sternum. He looked nervous but resigned. “Well, if I fall over, keep going, I probably won’t catch up.”

“ _Bozhe moy_ ,” Natasha said, _oh my God_ , half to herself. Steve caught at her wrist. His fingers circled it— his hands were bigger than hers, large for his size, but not anywhere near as big as she was used to them being. 

“Was that in Russian?” he asked. 

“Yes,” she said. 

“Well, shit,” he said, and then, in Russian, “I speak Russian now.”

“It has begun,” she said, alarmed, and tugged him into the locker room with her. “If you’re gaining things like that, it has begun.” She flung open the lockers as she went down the row, hurriedly, and found clothing in one, shoes in another, even underwear, which was an improvement over some missions. She dressed hastily; it was all tactical gear, close-fitting and rugged. 

Steve wore a smaller size of trousers than she did, and the same size shirt. She paused, for a moment, and took his wrist, holding his hand up palm-out so she could fit her palm against his. His hands were bigger than hers, with long delicate fingers. And his face— his eyes, his mouth were the same, but in a much narrower face, smaller all over. It was so strange. 

He was eerily beautiful, all birdlike grace. His hips were narrower than hers, his waist smaller, and his shoulders were only a little broader. Her breasts meant her torso was thicker than his.

“I know,” he said, a little defensive, “I’m scrawny.”

“You’re my size,” she said. “It’s— you’re the same size as me.”

He looked at her. “Guess I never thought of it like that,” he said. 

“Maybe now you won’t have such an easy time of slamming me into walls,” she said, and let him see a sharp little flash of the irritation she sometimes felt when he manhandled her. He wasn’t any worse to her than he was to anyone else; he was more aware of the physical power he wielded than most, and judicious about using it, but he did use it. 

He blushed a little, gratifyingly. “Doesn’t mean I won’t try,” he said, stubborn, and frowned, trying shoes on until he found a pair that fit. They were basic combat boots, standard Russian issue. Natasha pulled out her size on the first try and laced them up, listening carefully; she was glad of Steve’s honesty about his limitations, because she had to consciously remember not to rely on his hearing and vision the way she normally did. 

“So,” she said, “this is the Red Room’s virtual training simulator. At least, that’s what I knew it as. It may have been in wider use for HYDRA or the KGB, I don’t know— probably not, as their relationship with HYDRA wasn’t all that close. We were sent here to gain skills and receive mission parameters. Bucky’s in here somewhere. That may or may not be the mission the machine is set to give us, so we may face considerable obstacles as far as finding him.”

“Who sets the machine?” Steve asked. His hair was drying into a floppy fringe, fine and silky and limp. It was the same hairstyle she remembered when she’d first met him. 

“The operators,” she said. “Which in this case is Wells, the HYDRA woman, and Yelena, and Tony, and I don’t know how good their control is. What I’m worried about is that Zola may have found some way to interface with it, and may exercise some control over the environment as well. Tony knows that and will be working to counter it but the thing is, time moves a lot faster in here than it does out there for them, so he may be behind the eight ball.”

“Hm,” Steve said. 

“Which is why I was planning to have someone experienced in here with me,” Natasha finished. She strapped a series of knives to herself, found and checked a couple of pistols, hunted down a set of flashlights. “You shouldn’t have come, Steve.”

“I couldn’t stay behind,” he said, and he was gearing up too, but she could see that all of his muscle memory with handling guns and knives had come from a different body. It was going to be hard for him to fight like this. He noticed her regard. “I didn’t know I’d come through like this. I don’t know why I did.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know either,” she said, “but I know I haven’t had this hairstyle in almost ten years.”

“You look younger,” he said. 

“You’re saying I normally look old,” she observed, darting him a sly look. 

“I never,” he said, a little flustered, “well, I mean. Hey.”

She gave him a contemplative once-over. “Well,” she said. “One advantage of your shape, anywhere I can go, you can go. If it’s a building, I’ll try taking us through the ventilation shafts. Hand-to-hand fighting wouldn’t be ideal.”

“No,” he said resignedly, “it wouldn’t.” 

“All your reflexes are going to be off,” she said. “Your balance, your reach. Stick to guns.”

His face set stubbornly, but he said, with a sigh, “Yeah.”

 

They made their way out the far door of the locker room, and it brought them out onto a deserted streetscape. It was hazy, ill-defined, and the buildings hung like shadows in an eerie half-light. 

“I don’t recognize the city,” Natasha said, checking the architecture against the many places she’d visited. Street wide enough for automobile traffic, paved, with overhead power wires, illegible signs in front of shopfronts, multistory buildings looming poorly-defined. 

Steve frowned. “I can’t see it well enough,” he said. “If there’s anything recognizable, I can’t make it out.” 

She nodded. “Well,” she said, “clearly, there’s nothing in this part of the environment that we can interact with. We’re meant to go somewhere, through all this.” 

“Is that how it works?” Steve asked. 

“Usually,” she said. 

Suddenly everything went dark, and there was a slowing grinding noise as machinery somewhere slowed to a halt in an evident power cut. “What,” Steve said, alarmed. 

Natasha laughed, low and soft, shaking her head, and said, “Glitch.”

“What?” Steve’s voice was a little louder; he’d turned in the pitch darkness.

Natasha felt for the flashlight at her belt, and switched it on. It illuminated Steve’s pale face, bright eyes blinking, but nothing else, though she swung it for his benefit— no walls, no ceiling, featureless floor. “The computer’s hung up,” she said. “It failed to load a simulation. This happens when they try to do something they don’t know how to do. Given who our operators are, and how experienced they’re _not,_ I’m not surprised.”

“What happens to us?” Steve asked, wary but not visibly frightened. His thinner face was still jarring to her, because his voice was almost the same but his whole demeanor was different. He acted the same, but it read completely differently from this smaller frame. 

Natasha shrugged. “We’ll be in complete darkness until it comes back,” she said. “They have to load a new environment, or fix the old one.”

“Is it just…” Steve looked around, pulling a flashlight from his own belt. “Dark?”

“Depends,” Natasha said. “Sometimes the environment you were in just stops dead, but everything’s still there. Sometimes you can interact with stuff. Sometimes all you have is what’s on you, like this. Apart from what we can touch right now, there’s nothing.”

“How long does it last?” Steve asked. 

She shrugged again. “An hour, two hours, three hours.” At his expression, she laughed. “Remember time passes much faster in here than it does really, so even if they fix it in a few minutes, to us it still seems like at least an hour.”

“What do you do for all that time?” Steve asked. “Is it dangerous?”

“Nothing that isn’t human will be able to move or be interacted with,” Natasha said. “So there are no simulated enemies, no dangerous objects. There’s nothing we can do, except talk to each other, or sleep.”

Steve sighed, and immediately sat down on the ground. “Then I’d better rest up my feet,” he said. “Really, you used to just sit around?”

Natasha laughed again, and sighed in fond memory as she settled down next to Steve. Impulse made her sit down close enough for their hips to brush. “Depends who I was in with,” she said, toying with the flashlight. “Yelena and I used to fuck.”

“What,” Steve said sharply, staring at her.

“Please,” she said, “we were teenage girls. You saw her. Wouldn’t you?”

“I,” Steve said, a little strangled, then said in a more collected tone, “I didn’t know you were bisexual.”

“I’m an opportunist,” Natasha said. “Yelena is a lesbian, though she thinks she is bisexual. Yelena is also incredibly attractive and I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who would turn her down.”

“Fair,” Steve said. “I mean,” he hedged, “ _I_ would, but—“

“Not in here,” Natasha said. “Think about it. These aren’t even really our bodies. There are no sexually transmitted diseases, nobody’s going to get pregnant, you’re not even going to remember it when you get out of here.”

“Well,” Steve said, and looked uncomfortable for a moment, but then he smiled. “Yeah well, one thing this body had going for it, pretty much nobody wanted to fuck me when I looked like this.”

“I would,” Natasha said, before she could think better of it. But it was the truth. He was still attractive, with the same pretty face minus the heft of the jaw, and there was something just charming about how his body was so close to hers in size. 

“You don’t mean that,” Steve said, with a laugh. “Maybe if I were still Captain Ab-merica— or is it Captain Ass-merica?”

“Your ass is just about the same size it ever was,” Natasha pointed out. Which wasn’t true; Steve’s Captain America body had a ridiculous taper from the shoulders, but he did still have a perky little ass. In this body Steve was almost all bone, with very little spare flesh anywhere let alone his hindquarters. “And I’m not saying I wouldn’t fuck you as Captain America if the situation were as consequence-free as this one. Hell, there are a lot of situations where I would, not just this. I’m just saying, right here, right now, I would greatly enjoy a chance to kill some time with you in some way that didn’t involve the world’s least-rewarding game of I Spy.”

Steve looked blankly at her, hair falling across his forehead. “I’m not— gay,” he said. “You know that, right?”

“Yes,” Natasha said slowly. “I know that. I wasn’t recommending women to date because I’m an asshole. Why are you asking?”

“I’m saying,” Steve said, and his expression shuttered a little, “it’s mean to tease.”

“I’m not teasing,” Natasha said, and reached over and grabbed the back of his neck, holding his face still so she could take his mouth.

He was just as responsive as the last time she’d kissed him, mouth slightly open in shock and clearly reacting in advance of his brain. It was phenomenal, Natasha thought, not for the first time, that Steve Rogers was the kind of person who kissed back in reflex. It said something about his formative years, but what it said she couldn’t be sure. Definitely that he was used to kissing, far more than his almost-prudish manners suggested. 

“Natasha,” he said, a little strangled, and she grinned and pried his mouth farther open with the pressure of her jaw, sliding her tongue into his mouth. 

“C’mon,” she murmured, “I’ve wanted to do this to you for years, and in here it really doesn’t matter.”

“I,” Steve said, and she put the flashlight down and climbed into his lap, holding his jaw between both hands as she explored his mouth. Her thighs bracketed his narrow hips, and she pressed against his concave belly with her pelvis, enjoying how small he was— it was like being with a woman, only it was nothing like being with a woman, and she quite liked it. 

There— his arms went to her hips, and he wasn’t pushing her away, and his tongue curled around hers. “Natasha,” he said again, and she could feel his heartbeat fluttering in his neck under her fingertips, fast and uneven and shallow. He really did have a heart defect. 

“Steve,” she said, “I’m not being an asshole. I’ve caught you looking at my ass. C’mon, don’t you want to?”

“I do,” he admitted, “I just— we won’t even remember?”

“No,” she said, “we won’t, and when it’s glitched like this, there won’t be any recording of it, and none of the observers can see us.”

“But you remember that you’ve done this,” Steve pointed out, but his hands were wrapped around her waist now— smaller than his new body’s hands, but still larger than a woman of his height was likely to have, and Natasha shuddered a little thinking about how long his fingers were, how strong his hands, but how delicate-looking— this could be very nice, indeed, if he had any idea what he was doing. 

“I remember a lot of things,” she said, “only in here. It uses a slightly different part of your brain. If we come back in here, we’ll remember this. But out in the real world, we won’t, not really. You get impressions. But I know you’ve thought about fucking me, and I’ll admit I’ve thought a whole lot about fucking you, and so it won’t really change anything.”

“Oh,” Steve said, and she ground herself down into his lap, a little prickle of desire thrumming up her spine, and she felt him move in response, pushing insistently up against her. He wasn’t hard yet, or the angle wasn’t right, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t know him well enough to know if he dressed right or left, and this body was strange to her beyond that, she didn’t know his proportions. 

“I hadn’t known, but remember now, that I was in here with Bucky a lot, when he was the Winter Soldier,” she said softly. “All those things he remembered, when he was drugged? I remember them now too.”

“Really,” Steve said, and his color was high, eyes bright— he was into this, now, and moved one hand up from her waist to her breast. She arched her back, pushing into his touch, and ground herself against him, breathing hard. 

“He and I were lovers across multiple training sessions,” she said. “In here. It— they gave us covert missions and things. I don’t think they used him for that much in real life, not with that metal arm, but in here he didn’t always have the metal arm, and he was a lot more coherent than I remember him in real life.”

“Really,” Steve said again, and there— okay, he was about half-hard. His body language said he was really into this, but he clearly wasn’t progressing as well as she was. She ground down on him a little more intently. “You remember that now?”

“It makes a lot more sense,” she said. “In here, we were taught to rely on each other. In here is where all that came from. It’s not a trap, it’s not conditioning, it’s just training experience. I loved him, truly, when I didn’t have anyone else in the world I felt like that about.”

“That’s, that’s actually sweet,” Steve said, and kissed her, hungry and searching. 

“I was worried you weren’t into this,” she said, reaching down and palming at his cock through his clothes. He gasped and twitched. 

“No,” he said, “I am, I just— I had pretty bad circulation and terrible blood pressure, I don’t exactly— well, let’s just say I don’t perform like the new body does.”

“I don’t know how the new body does,” Natasha said coyly. “But I was just thinking that those strong hands of yours could do the job even if the rest of you didn’t cooperate— as long as you were willing. So I just wanted to check in.”

“Erections and willingness aren’t directly related,” Steve said. “There’s a loose correlation, yeah, but they don’t necessarily go together. I assure you, I’m on board with this even if my parts aren’t there yet.” 

“Really,” Natasha said. 

“Oh yes,” Steve answered. He slid his hands up to her arms and rolled their bodies down to the floor, mouthing down her neck and unzipping the front of her coveralls. “So, there’s really no danger?”

“No,” she said, “there’s nothing that can happen. Even if you or I wanted to kill each other, we couldn’t do it, it wouldn’t take; there’s no interface, there’s no feedback.”

“When it comes back, will it be sudden?” he asked. 

“There’s usually a minute or so of sounds before it comes back online,” she answered. “And it kind of spins up gradually. Enough time usually to get dressed again, and even if you don’t, the operators usually can’t see you right away. Their data’s all scrambled.”

“Good to know,” Steve said, and pulled her tank top up and sucked at her breast.

He had a good mouth— not as clever as James, not as sure, and not as familiar, but he knew what to do, clearly had at least some experience at sex. He worked his way down her torso and into her briefs, sliding his hand down first and opening her up with strong, nimble fingers. She stripped off her clothes most of the way after a little while of this, and let him use his mouth on her. 

His fingers were every bit as perfect as she’d suspected, long and thin and delicate and strong and sure, and he took her apart with his hands and his mouth. 

“Oh wow,” he murmured as she came, clamping down rhythmically, “you’re gonna pull my fingers clean off.”

“Steve,” she moaned, “oh,” and managed a laugh. “How well do you think your cock would fare in there?”

“Oh man,” he said. “Natasha, that’s an experiment I could bear to make.”

She sat up on her elbows, watching him pull his fingers out and lick them slowly. “Was that your first time with a woman since 1945?” she asked, teasing.

He laughed. “Maybe,” he said. She could see that he was hard, his erection tenting the front of his coveralls. 

“Well? You want to give it a shot?” she asked, nodding at his erection. 

“What?”

She sat up the rest of the way and shoved his coveralls off his shoulders. “Fucking,” she said. “You wanna?”

“Oh,” he said, “yeah, sure. I mean— but, we don’t have any rubbers—“

“It’s not real,” she said. “So it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay,” he said. She pushed him down onto his back, and slipped her hand into his briefs. His cock was hot and hard and bigger than she’d expected. He hitched against her, gasping a little. “Oh— I—“

“You gonna last?” she asked. “Or am I going to need your hand again?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I haven’t— things are different in this— in this body.”

“I don’t know how your other body handles either,” she said, stroking him carefully. He was uncut, and had a nice upward curve now that he was pretty well filled out. 

“It’s weird,” Steve said. “I— I was used to, well— this. Now with the new body I can get hard in like three seconds, over and over again. I don’t— it’s weird. It’s been weir— oh! Oh wow. Oh— okay.”

She had started stroking him a bit more firmly, and grinned at him; he was all the way hard now, hips hitching up into her touch. “Let me do the work,” she said. “I don’t want to overtax your heart.”

He swatted at her arm, rolling his eyes, but lay back and let her climb onto him. It was awkward with her boots still on, trailing her coveralls from her calves, but she managed, pinning his legs with their tangled clothing and putting her hand on his shoulder to hold herself steady. 

He was sharp-boned, birdlike, and it made him look wide-eyed. She’d just shoved his tank top up over his narrow chest; his shoulders stuck out in a spare framework, decidedly unfeminine, and his torso stretched out in a lean sharp-ribbed expanse, the belly flat to the point of hollowness. He tipped his sharp little chin back, showing a pronounced ridge of Adam’s apple, as she sank down onto his length. 

“Steven,” she said, with a shiver; he was hot and thick enough to fill her. 

“Natalia,” he said, raising an eyebrow at her with more self-possession than she’d expected. He bit his lower lip. “Jesus,” he said, rolling his head limply. “Jesus. Holy fuck. I’m not used to getting dizzy like that anymore.”

“You good?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” he said, breathless, “yeah, I— oh.”

She started to move, and he held her hips, blinking distant-eyed. His erection flagged a little, for a moment, dizzy as he was, and she ground down against him, watching him in some concern, but after a moment he rallied and breathed in deep, looking up at her with a glimmer of mischief in his eye before grabbing her waist and starting to thrust up into her.

“Oh,” she said sharply, as she saw sparks suddenly, and clamped down on him with her thighs and cunt. “Yes.” 

“Holy fuck,” he said, and let go of her waist as she took over most of the enthusiastic motion. 

“Like that,” she hissed, “just like— like that— yes.” 

“Natasha,” he said, and put his hands on her breasts, catching her nipples between his fingers, kneading at the soft tissue. 

“It’s good,” she said, “Steve, it’s— it’s good— yes.”

“Yes,” he said, “yes, Natasha— yes—“

“Fuck,” she gasped, and shoved down against him, pressing insistently down as her orgasm rolled up her body and back down again. “Fuck— fuck— yes—“

“Holy shit,” Steve said, going distant-eyed. “Holy— shit.” He was biting his lips. 

“Steve,” she said, “c’mon, it’s— yeah.”

He shivered, but slowed his motions as she rode out a couple of aftershocks, and after a moment he rolled her onto her back and re-entered her. “Natasha,” he said, kissing her, “Natasha—“

She moaned; she probably wouldn’t come again but he felt so good in her, so satisfying and— reassuring, maybe— and his body was so hot, she’d expected him to be cold, skinny as he was, but he was like a skinny furnace, radiating heat, rocking into her slow and deep, his chest pressed to hers, his elbows next to her shoulders, cradling her face in his hands and kissing her, slow and gentle and thorough the way he fucked, and she had a dizzying moment of imagining him at the size she was used to him, how this same posture would enfold her, would protect her, cover her— 

_Fuck_ , she thought, _I’m in love with Steve fucking Rogers, that doesn’t even make sense_. And it definitely, definitely wasn’t the purely physical lust she’d been hoping it was.

She bit his shoulder, for that, and he made a heartfelt noise and fucked her harder. “Tasha,” he gasped, and she shoved her hips up to meet him and _oh_ that was a good _oh_ angle right _there_ —

“Steve,” she said, “fuck—“ and his hips were snapping into her with real force now, and it was all strength with no weight behind them, but he was still kissing her like they were lovers, like this meant something, like this was their goddamn wedding night or something, and she wanted to shove him away but also at the same time she wanted to wrap her arms around him and not let go, so she settled for jerking her pelvis up against his and scratching her nails down his back and letting herself make godawful noises as she got really really close again. 

He came first, losing his rhythm and crying out against her mouth, but he kept going, dogged and determined, and stayed hard enough that she shivered over the edge to another orgasm. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she moaned, “Steve, God, it’s not fair that you’re good at this too,” and she had forgotten that he spoke Russian now. 

“There, there, sunshine,” he murmured in the same language, breathing hard as he kissed her face, her eyelids. “I learned from the best, and I know you know what he’s like.”

She sighed, shuddering with a little aftershock that made him hiss and drop his head down next to her ear. “I love him,” she said, stirred to honesty by an excess of post-orgasm hormones and the knowledge that this was all going to vanish in a bit, only to be revisited in dreams. All you retained from these things were muscle memories, and she had tons of muscle memories of fucking. It wasn’t even Steve’s current body, there was nothing there to jog her memory later. 

“I do too,” Steve said. 

“We could share him?” Natasha said. 

Steve laughed, and kissed her. “That we could,” he said, and pulled out of her, slow enough to make her shiver again. 

“There’s enough to go around,” she said. 

He kissed her again, still lying on top of her, and it was a novelty that he was so light— she outweighed him, it was like holding a woman in her arms, he was smaller than Yelena, smaller even than Tatiana. She could hold him forever, she thought. “You know,” he said, “what’s funny is, you’re not the first person to suggest that.”

“Suggest sharing?” she asked. “No, Steve, I know that. Polyamory is a thing.”

Steve laughed again. “No, I meant that specifically,” he said. “I mean, sharing me with Bucky.”

“Well,” Natasha said, “Sam gave you permission, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, “but I meant— I didn’t know it at the time. Peggy told me, later. In the nursing home. She gave me the funniest little grin and said she’d approached Bucky about it, almost the first time they’d met— as soon as she’d realized how we were, saw how he looked at me.”

“Oh,” Natasha said, and pushed his hair out of his face, wishing she wasn’t going to forget this quite so easily. 

“She said she went to him and proposed an arrangement,” Steve said, wistful. “Back then I don’t know that it was something people did. They didn’t talk about it anyway. Not like they do now, on the Internet. But she worked it out. Said she saw no need to come between us.” 

“That sounds like it would’ve been nice,” Natasha said, letting herself play with his hair. His hair was really soft and fine, almost like a child’s. 

“It would’ve,” Steve said, and put his head down against her neck. “I don’t think Bucky remembers that. I referred to it and he didn’t seem to have any idea what I meant.”

Natasha’s relationship with Peggy Carter was basically nonexistent, but she respected the woman. She had realized, not long after she’d met Steve, what their history had been, and it had moved her somewhat to think of it as she’d gotten to know Steve under his Captain Rogers facade. That feeling came back, now, and she wrapped her arms around his head and pulled his face to her breast. “I’m sorry you never got a chance at that,” she said quietly. “It could have been lovely.”

Steve laughed, and nuzzled at her breast— his breathing was still fast, and tight, and she could feel his fluttery pulse where her palm rested against his neck. 

“No,” he said eventually, “I don’t think it would have worked out well.”

“No?” She tilted her head a little, so she could see his face. 

He had his eyes closed, and looked sad. “Peggy’s a realist,” he said. “One of us would have broken the other eventually. And Bucky— the war really fucked him up, and I don’t think either of us would have known how to help him.”

“Shh,” Natasha said suddenly, turning her head. There was a faint rumbling noise. “Shit. It’s coming back online.”

Steve scrambled off her and they both yanked their clothes back into place. He was flushed, beautifully pink in his cheeks and nose, his lips bright red, and she took a moment to kiss him again. “It’s our secret,” she murmured, grinning against his mouth. “Nobody will know. Not even our real selves.”

Steve gave her a wry look. “It’s almost a shame,” he said. 

“You know it wouldn’t work,” Natasha said, retying her boot lace. Her thighs were a little wobbly, she realized as she stood, and she laughed as the lights flickered back on. 


	16. Bye-Bye Brooklyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which virtual realities are explored, identities are questioned, and Steve swears a lot, justifiably.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That was an unintended hiatus! I have been working on this throughout, just... slowly.   
> (Hey if anyone didn't know, I posted a story for the Buckynat Mini-Bang 2015! It's not in continuity with this one but it's based on really similar characterizations. [Ora Pro Nobis](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3561698), featuring entirely Natasha's POV and extensive cameos by her cat Liho. Plus illustrations, which excited me immensely because nobody has ever illustrated my stuff before.) 
> 
> Anyway. Hope this isn't too confusing and assuages the disappointment of such a long break! And sorry, I've gone through a bad-brains phase and haven't been answering comments but I assure you I have treasured every one. <3 <3 <3 to everyone and thank you for reading!

“Wait a god-damned minute,” Sam said, frowning intently at the oddly uninformative holographic screen. He’d gotten the hang of Stark’s weird displays but this one wasn’t working quite right. 

“That’s what I said,” Tony said, rolling his eyes. 

“Are you telling me he wasn’t supposed to go in there at all?” Sam asked. Tony’s attention was fixed on the display. The doctor lady looked concerned, fiddling with Steve’s IV, and the two women who were strangers were standing near Tony, the dark-haired one carefully avoiding meeting anyone’s eyes and the blonde one looking either disgusted or delighted, it was hard to tell which.

Also, the blonde one, _damn_. Sam had been pretty comfortably gay for a while but after Natasha this was the second woman who’d made him reconsider in the last couple of weeks. Maybe he needed to re-examine that policy. 

_Focus, Wilson._  

He glared down at Steve’s unconscious body, hooked up to electrodes— and yeah, now that he looked, they were a little haphazard. He knew JARVIS had told everybody he was coming; by the time he got here Steve was already hooked up and he’d been too overwhelmed by getting the full story to pick up on how weird the atmosphere was. 

“Yeah, as soon as he found out you were here he basically shoved Yelena out of the way,” Tony said. “Natasha was already under or I bet she’d’ve objected. She had a plan. But you know Steve.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, fury fading to a grim cold weariness, “I do.”

“It probably won’t kill him,” the blonde said, British accent, far too casual— she was amused, at least on some level. Or she was projecting amusement. It wasn’t just her hotness that reminded him of Natasha. Oh no. This chick was from the same school of charm. 

“That’s great,” Sam said, not even bothering to soften the sarcasm. “That’s fan-fuckin’-tastic. Anybody wanna catch me up on what the fuck this-all is?”

“Tall order, cowboy,” Tony said. “I’ll give you a hint though. This is Yelena Belova, formerly of Department X,” and he gestured to the blonde. That explained some things. She smirked. “And this is Regina Wells, formerly— and I mean, as of this morning— of HYDRA.”

Sam stared at the two of them. “Okay,” he said, “don’t bother explaining, just sum it up.”

“You know what,” said a voice from behind him, and he turned with no small feeling of relief— it was definitely Lakeisha’s voice— but stopped dead when he saw her. “Let me.” 

Her t-shirt and jeans were soaked in drying blood and she’d clearly been crying, but looked calm and unruffled and wryly amused. “The hell happened to you,” Sam said blankly. 

“Been a hell of a morning,” Lakeisha said. “Hold on to your ass, I got a feelin’ it’s not gonna get any better.”

“Fuck,” Tony said suddenly. “What happened?” 

Sam looked over, alarmed, and the holographic display had gone mostly dark. “What,” he said, stomach dropping. 

“It’s a, what d’ye call it, glitch,” Yelena said. 

“Will that kill them?” Sam demanded. 

“Vitals holding steady in all three subjects,” the doctor lady said quietly. 

“No,” Yelena said, “it just dumps you into a dark space with no features and you have to sit there bored while they reboot the scenario.” She waved a hand. “You missed the cue to load the next scenario so now you have to reboot the thing. Look, right there, it’s tapped into Steve’s memories, it shouldn’t be hard to load a scenario right out of that. It only takes a couple of moments, fifteen tops.”

“Time passes faster in there, though,” the other woman, Wells, said, with a frown.

“Well, yes,” Yelena said. “It’ll probably be at least an hour for them, where they can’t do anything.”

“So what happens?”

Yelena shrugged, unconcerned. “Natasha and I used to fuck,” she said, with a flippant shrug. “It was that or sit in the dark and do nothing.”

Sam blinked, traded raised-eyebrow looks with Lakeisha. Natasha and Yelena. It was mind-bendingly hot. But then he looked down at the three still bodies, and that was plenty to quench his confused libido. Christ, Barnes looked awful, half-naked and bandaged, pale and blood-smeared and bruised. 

“Used… to… _fuck_ ,” Tony said, blinking rapidly. “Wait, since when is Natasha a lesbian?”

“You have no idea,” Yelena said, and that was a glimmer of what looked like genuine amusement.

 

* * * 

 

Steve shivered and picked up the pace. “It’s eerie,” he said.

Natasha looked at the blank streets, barely-sketched outlines of buildings, and said, “It is. I imagine it’s worse if this were anywhere I’d ever been.” There were cars, but motionless, frozen in place, bare hints of shadowy people, colors faded and strange, everything blurred as if half-glimpsed and mostly forgotten. She couldn’t make out details, and there was an odd warped quality to some of the features. But Steve recognized it, knew exactly where they were, could even pick out details to clue him in as to the particular date— a shopfront’s dim sign displaying specials, a boarded-up window, it was 1938, this was the neighborhood between where he’d lived and worked then, he knew it absolutely without hesitation.

A suspicion began to form as she listened to Steve’s breathing, tight and too fast and shallow. “Do you have… any vision problems?” she asked. 

He shot her a look, face going quite still. “Yes,” he said. “Colorblindness and astigmatism.”

She nodded. “They’re using your memories, then,” she said, and waved a hand. He gave her an alarmed look. “Colors are weirdly muted, things are unexpectedly and unevenly blurry.”

Steve nodded, and put his head down, continuing to walk fast, jogging perhaps out of habit across streets despite their strange echoing vacancy. “Hearing problems too,” he said. “You getting those?”

“No,” she said. “Well. I suppose. There aren’t many noises.”

He led them unerringly through the still neighborhood, nearly running. The bones of the neighborhood were clearly New York, recognizable enough to Natasha in the layout of the streets and the disposition of the buildings. “Where are we headed?” Natasha asked, though she could guess.

“Home,” Steve said grimly. “Seems like the logical place to look.”

“It looks like they’ve rebooted and pulled the scene from your memories,” Natasha said. “But where that puts James, I couldn’t begin to guess. And as for Zola…”

“I’m not looking forward to seeing my memories populated by an evil genius AI,” Steve said. His breathing was high and tight, but he was ignoring it, small chin jutting determinedly from the set of his jaw. 

They were on a residential street, Natasha thought, though she didn’t recognize anything. She knew Brooklyn decently well, she’d spent enough time in it, but clearly this whole neighborhood had been rebuilt since 1938. Steve moved unerringly, unworried by the strange fuzziness or glitches, and led her up the steps of an old brownstone. 

He stopped, hand going to his hip, and she recognized the gesture. He was patting himself down for his keys with the habitual and slightly hopeless air of someone who frequently misplaced them. “Well,” he said, glancing self-consciously over at her. “I clearly don’t have my key.”

Natasha looked at him, looked at the door, and produced her lock picks from her wrist sheath. It took her a moment to deal with the fact that Steve’s memory apparently included the rusty tumblers in the door lock, but she was pleased to note that her physical reflexes remembered how to adjust to being virtual with no trouble. She’d spent enough time like this, sometimes she thought about how much older she really was, mentally, than her body, since she’d spent so much time in this accelerated virtual reality. Lifetimes, all told. 

“Got it,” she said, as the lock finally clicked, and she opened the door and looked warily into the hallway. Faded wallpaper, old-fashioned chair rail and banister, rickety-looking steps. 

Steve took a long tight breath, held it, and let it out slowly, but that probably had more to do with emotion than an attempt to control his asthma. “They repainted in ’39,” he said. “Right over the wallpaper.” He blinked slowly. “So this is ’38. Bucky’s dad is still alive but my mom is dead.”

“Unless Zola changed that around,” Natasha said. “He may have a modicum of control that we don’t, over how he appears or who he constructs in this environment.”

“Great,” Steve muttered. “If he shows up as my mother I’m going to lose my mind.”

“Sorry,” Natasha said. “I’m not sure what he’s capable of. Just… be careful.”

She wanted to precede him up the stairs but she didn’t know the way, and it was just more efficient to let him lead. He walked unevenly, with none of the grace she was used to in his new body. His legs were still long relative to his body, but he was so small, so slight, shoulders high and narrow and square. 

He paused, visibly steeling himself, and walked down the second floor landing to the door that led to what Natasha assumed was the rear apartment. “I can pick locks,” he said, looking sidelong at her. 

“Just let me,” she said, “I know this set of lock picks.” He gave her a go-ahead gesture, and she knelt by the apartment door, listening intently for any movement inside for a moment before she set to work on the much less-rusty tumblers of this lock. 

The door swung open, and she held Steve back with one hand, eyes sweeping the edges of the frame for indicator marks, for traps, for anything amiss. She moved slowly into the apartment’s entryway— coats on hooks. “Bucky’s coat’s there,” Steve murmured. “Shoes too.” 

“Yours?”

“No,” Steve said. “Looks like I’m… not home.” 

Natasha made a face at the paradox, and edged in. Virtual environments: just real enough to kill you, not always real enough to convince you. “Bathtub in the kitchen,” she said skeptically, seeing it. 

“Yeah,” Steve answered, in a near-whisper, and laughed softly. “Didn’t seem weird at the time.”

“Huh,” she said. So that wasn’t incorrect. That was weird. She poked carefully at the antique range-top. It wouldn’t seem antique to Steve, would it. There was a note on the counter. Steve came up beside her and picked it up. 

“Jesus,” he breathed. “I know what day this was. His mom left this note while I was at work.” His eyes went to the doorway at the far end of the room. “Bucky was home sick from work. He’d been hurt.”

Natasha eyed the loopy, angular writing, working to decipher it. It took a moment for her brain to get the knack of the writing, but it was legible enough once she did. 

_Steve_

_Came by for a bit— left you some food in the icebox— that’s for both of you— Rory says the important thing is to keep J’s fever down but I don’t have to tell you how to do that— R also says if J falls asleep and won’t wake send for him right away— I’d have stayed longer but J was very out of sorts and saying cruel things— I will stop by again first thing a.m. if I don’t hear before— love to you both— MB_

“That would mean Bucky’s in the bedroom,” Steve breathed. “Least, he was when I got home and found this note in real life.”

J. James. Oh. Natasha drew one of her guns and went to the bedroom doorway, putting her back to the edge of the doorframe and standing at the ready. Steve opened the bedroom door carefully, and stood off to the other side as it swung open. 

There was a moment of tense silence. Natasha could hear someone breathing, someone who sounded heavily asleep. Steve gave her an uncertain look, and she bit her lip. Finally Steve squared his shoulders and stepped sideways into the room. He’d drawn a gun too, but had it down by his side, inconspicuous. 

“Bucky,” Steve said, the tension leaving his posture; he sounded broken. 

Natasha went in after him. There were two narrow beds, pushed together against one of the walls of the small room, opposite the window. And sprawled across them, loosely curled on one side, tangled in a blanket, was Bucky— with two flesh-and-blood arms, short hair, and a clean-shaven face. He looked young, and flushed with sleep, babyfaced and innocent, and he was wearing a grimy singlet and blue-striped white cotton shorts. 

“Bucky,” Steve said again, flattening himself against the opposite wall and breathing with an effort. He closed his eyes. “What do we do now?”

“It depends,” Natasha said. She really didn’t know what to expect here. She knew the machine had a rudimentary AI, had constructed personalities that could interact with the surroundings. Some of them had been very advanced, had been convincingly human. She was sure Zola would be able to do the same. But what form would he take?

Steve went to one of the dressers in the corner of the room, pulled out a white button-down shirt, yanked it on over his tac suit, and buttoned it, then sat on the edge of the bed. “Bucky,” he said. “Bucky.” He reached out gingerly and put his hand against Bucky’s left shoulder, and made a worried hissing noise. 

“What?” Natasha asked. 

“He’s burning up,” Steve said, pressing his hand more firmly against Bucky’s shoulder, moving it up to the side of his neck. He holstered his pistol to cradle Bucky’s head in both hands. Bucky was unresponsive, unmoving. “He was like this when I came home that day too. He had an infected knife wound. It got pretty bad, and I thought he was going to die a couple of times, but he eventually pulled through. It was terrifying.”

“Was he unresponsive like this?” Natasha asked. 

“A couple times,” Steve said. He gently let go of Bucky, and left the room, going into the kitchen. She heard water running. She moved over and took Bucky’s pulse. He felt human, he felt real, as real as Steve did. She pinched the flesh on the underside of his arm, but he didn’t twitch; he was really out. 

Well. The Winter Soldier she’d known, in here, would have had good enough discipline to fake unconsciousness through that kind of stimulus. She didn’t know if he did anymore, and bet he wouldn’t have been able to before the war. But he would have been able to then. 

She could remember him a lot more clearly in here. Yes, he’d called her Natalia— Natasha was just a diminutive of the name, and it was a little stuffy and old-fashioned to use the formal name, but he had. And she remembered him having the traumatic breakthrough and remembering his name had been James. She remembered making love to him, remembered conspiring with him to help each other when they came out of the machine. And she remembered the fatal slip, when he’d nearly been killed and she’d said his name, unthinking, within hearing of the operators— and they had heard her, and had yanked both of them back out, and the next time they’d met in the machine he hadn’t known her. It wasn’t long after that she’d defected. 

Steve came back with a couple of wet dishtowels and pressed them against Bucky’s pulse points, neck and wrists and forehead. “His fever was too high then too,” he said, a little grimly. He glanced over at her. “We didn’t have antibiotics yet, not really. Not for widespread use. We had stuff that’d kill bacteria on contact but nothing if it had already invaded your body. Not until during the war.”

“I hadn’t realized,” she said. 

“People look up when antibiotics were invented,” Steve said, smoothing Bucky’s damp hair back tenderly, “but nobody really thinks about how hard they used to be to make.”

“Medicine was hard to get when I was a child,” she said. “I do understand about that.”

“C’mon, Bucky,” Steve said. 

Natasha went through her little first-aid kit. “Fever reducer,” she said, pulling out a little blister pack. “Ah. Yes, antibiotic. If he’s not real, it won’t affect him. If he is, it’ll help him.”

Steve stared at her. “That had never occurred to me,” he said. 

“He feels real to me,” Natasha said, “but if he’s not,” and she shrugged. “We just gotta get him conscious enough to swallow pills.”

Steve went back out to the kitchen and chipped off some ice from the icebox. Natasha had to go look at it, since she’d never seen one in real life. While she was there, she poked around the kitchen, letting herself be curious. There had still been kitchens furnished like this in Russia when she was a child, she knew that, but she remembered it dimly, and mistrusted most of her older memories. 

“If medicine will help him,” Steve said, getting a bowl from one of the cabinets, “then we probably should tend to the wound, too. Like I did then.”

“Yes,” Natasha said. 

He looked into the icebox again. “Do we need to eat, in here?” he asked. 

“We do get hungry,” she said. “It’s not… quite the same as the real world.”

“Just…” He looked a little wistful. “Bucky’s mom’s oxtail soup.”

Natasha laughed. “Go for it.”

 

* * * 

 

“You see the interface, here,” the blonde British woman said, gesturing at the holo-screen, “and these are their readouts.”

“What do the readouts mean, though?” Tony asked, frowning.

“Well, it’s not exactly going to be their vitals or whatever,” Wells said. She was the HYDRA agent, and Lakeisha was joining Sam in staring distrustfully at her. 

Her phone was blowing up though, which was kind of putting a damper on the distrustful staring. She was following, though. Stark’s main PR department was handling it, but she was getting a lot of Avengers-related flak that Stark’s PR was doing the best they could to deflect. 

Also, every single one of her relatives had attempted to call and she’d had to send out a mass text and now all the replies were going insane. As one expected. 

“Why not their vitals?” Sam asked. 

_Keesh_ , cousin Tamika wrote, _oh my God, I was so scared!_

“I’m monitoring those,” Dr. Montazeri said. 

“Because it’s not real-time,” the blonde said. “Time passes differently, remember?”

_Lil Dude is fine,_ Jeremy wrote, _didn’t understand what was going on so he didn’t get scared— are you sure you’re ok_

“Right,” Tony said, “right, but— what is all this?”

“Well,” the blonde— right, she was Yelena— said, “it’s their status. It’s kind of… a primitive interface for what’s really there. I don’t recall what all the interfaces are, but, see, this is their physical location relative to the map of the game.” She indicated two X’s on a faint grid. “The structures in the game are kind of crudely outlined on here, see this must be a building,” and she traced around a rectangle, “and this is a street, here.”

_I really am fine,_ Lakeisha wrote to Jeremy. _I was scared for a bit but really everything’s under control now. I learned some things. It was real interesting. I promise I’m fine, they said I could go home and I said no, I wanted to stay and help. I’m in no danger, it’s Bucky who’s hurt._

“Can you tell where they are?” Tony asked. 

“The map is zoomed out over here,” Yelena said. “Here’s the entire world. I don’t know where that is, it’s not somewhere I’ve memorized. A city with a  grid structure, but that doesn’t narrow it down all that much.”

Tony peered at it, and while Lakeisha really couldn’t make anything out, he made a “hunh!” kind of noise, and said, “I bet you anything that’s Brooklyn.”

_Lakeisha! We prayed for you,_ wrote aunt Marie.

“You did take the map from Steve’s memory,” Yelena pointed out. “So it stands to reason.”

_I didn’t see the news,_ wrote cousin Mike, _but I’m so glad to hear you’re okay!_

“And that,” Tony said, and pulled out his phone, pulled up a little holo screen, searched on it, came up with a floorplan. “Hm! An early 1900s New-Law tenement building.” He gave a low whistle. “Looks like Stevie went home.”

_What is going on????????_ wrote cousin Sherilyn.

“And this,” Yelena said, “is a little legend detailing their actions. Over here… let’s see… Natasha used lock-picks. Steve used… I don’t know what that is.” 

_That Bucky guy,_ Jeremy wrote. _He really owes you._

“An icebox,” Wells said. “I looked it up.”

“An icebox,” Tony said. 

_I’m pretty sure he doesn’t owe anybody anything at this point,_ Lakeisha wrote back to Jeremy. _If he survives this I’ll introduce you to him, you’ll get it._

“He took soup out of it,” Wells said. “They’ve eaten. There’s another player in the building with them.”

“Barnes?” Tony asked. 

“It’s not… exactly… what I expect Barnes’s signature to look like,” Yelena said, frowning. “Damn it, Natasha really should have let me come along.”

_I dunno,_ Jeremy wrote back, _nobody deserves to play my sister like this._

_I’m fine,_ Lakeisha wrote. She wished she had a clean shirt. A tiny traitorous part of her knew that if Pepper had stopped by here at all she’d have noticed and gotten her one. But Pepper was busy assuring the world that Stark Tower was fine. And that was important. And really, being covered in Bucky’s drying blood wasn’t so terrible, compared to the condition _he_ was in.

“She did try,” Sam said dryly. He elbowed Lakeisha. “Anything good on there?”

“My entire extended family is texting me because Stark Tower was on the news,” she said. 

“Oh,” Sam said, “oh shit.” 

“C’mere,” Lakeisha said, “I’m gonna take a selfie with you, that’ll make them all believe I’m fine.”

Sam gave his million-dollar smile without any further prompting, and she sent the message, letting him watch her type _Look, the Falcon’s here now, I’m totally safe._  

Unexpectedly, that made Sam put his arm around her. He pulled her in and embraced her, and she let him, and closed her eyes against the sudden sting. “You are okay,” he murmured. “You did real good.”

“Don’t make me cry,” she said. 

“Oh holy shit,” Tony said, and Lakeisha and Sam both sat up sharply at his tone. 

“That’s a newcomer,” Wells said. “Wait, I think this one is Barnes? Entering the house?”

“He has weapons though,” Tony said. 

“Natasha— yes, Natasha is fighting him,” Yelena said. “Oh! She’s shot him.”

“But that’s Barnes,” Wells said. 

“There’s another player in the— oh my,” Yelena said. 

“She shot him,” Tony said, blankly shocked. 

“Whoever that other player was— shit, another glitch,” Wells said. 

“Fuck,” Tony said. 

“Okay who shot who?” Sam demanded. 

“We need to load the next scenario,” Wells said, “someone got shot.”

“Here,” Yelena said. 

“It looks like Bucky showed up and Natasha fought him,” Tony explained distractedly, “and shot him non-fatally, and then she shot another person, who wasn’t Steve and wasn’t Bucky, except— I don’t know who the fuck it was. Can we tell if that was fatal?”

“Not until we load the next scenario,” Wells said. 

“Great,” Lakeisha said. 

“I’m going to pull the next scenario from Natasha’s memories,” Yelena said. “It looks like going off Steve’s didn’t lead us anywhere productive. Bye-bye, Brooklyn.”

“That sounds really fuckin’ ominous,” Lakeisha muttered to Sam, but it wasn’t like she could come up with anything better herself. 

 

 

* * * 

 

“Stevie?”

“Yeah? I’m right here, buddy,” Steve said. Bucky was lying with his head in Steve’s lap, Steve’s back propped against the wall. Natasha was sitting at the foot of the bed playing with the Brownie box camera she’d found on the shelf. 

“Steve,” Bucky said, blinking vaguely. “Aw Stevie. I had the weirdest fuckin’ dream. Are you mad at me?”

“Naw, Buck,” Steve said, “I’m not mad at you.” He was visibly fighting tears, and smoothed Bucky’s sweaty hair back away from his forehead. He’d been upset the whole time they’d been here, and Natasha couldn’t blame him. His dead mother’s effects were in a box under the bed, and he hadn’t been able to not cry when he’d found them. He’d let her pull him in against her shoulder, which was a first, and she’d sung to him, because sometimes dream-logic worked in here. 

Bucky looked around, sucking in a breath, then yawning. His eyes lit on Natasha, and he frowned, then shoved himself upright with a wince. “Natalia,” he said, incredulous.

She half-smiled. “Hello, James,” she said. “We’ve come to find you.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” he said, and twisted around to look at Steve. “It wasn’t— but— where are we?”

“It’s a virtual reality,” Steve said. 

Natasha put the Brownie down and crawled closer across the bed. “James,” she said, and caught his chin between her fingers. “Is it all you?”

“I dreamed there was someone else,” he said. He looked frightened, and younger than she’d ever known him. “Holding me prisoner.”

“There is,” she said, “and we are here to force him apart from you, but we have to find him first.”

Bucky took a deep breath, staring at her, then yanked his left hand out of the tangle of bedding and stared at it. It was human, not metal. He flexed it slowly, staring at it as if it were an advancing scorpion or venomous snake. 

Natasha had never seen his left hand, so she had no idea whether this were correct— his skin was a bit stained with machine grease, dirt ground under the nails, but the nails were well-groomed and neatly trimmed apart from that. There was a scar across the pad of his thumb, a callus on his palm from operating some kind of machine with a lever, a scattering of freckles on his forearm, a delicate tracery of blue veins under the pale skin at the wrist. 

Steve took the hand between both of his and held it. “Bucky,” he said. 

“You, you were bigger,” Bucky said uncertainly. “I— what really happened and what was a dream? Where the fuck are we?”

“We’re in the Mechtat,” Natasha said. “It’s really 2015 and we’re trying to get Zola out of your head, so he’s in here with us somewhere.”

Bucky grimaced. “He was in my head, Steve,” he said pleadingly, “and I couldn’t— I couldn’t tell you.”

“I knew something was wrong,” Steve said. “Bucky, I know you, I’ll always see. Don’t ever think I won’t. It might take me a minute but I’ll always figure it out, I’ll always come for you.”

Bucky clung onto his hands, breathing hard. “I love you,” he said, “I love both of you, but I swear to God, if you can’t get Zola out, you have to promise to fucking kill me. I can’t live like that any longer.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, and suddenly the lights went out. But the bed didn’t disappear, and Natasha sprang to her feet in the total darkness.

“Another glitch?” Steve asked. 

“No,” she said, “listen!” 

Something with a heavy tread was outside on the stairs. A man, perhaps, walking heavily, setting boots down and making the treads squeal. “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Bucky said, and from the rustle of bedding, sat up 

“Stay still,” Natasha said, moving out into the kitchen. She had a flashlight in one hand, a pistol in the other, and had them crossed over one another to hold both steady, finger on both triggers. “Neither of you move.”

Steve flicked on a flashlight, which came dimly through the door. “What is it?”

Bucky shushed him, and she heard them bickering in whispers over Steve giving Bucky one of his pistols. “Don’t,” she said suddenly, thinking of something— they had no guarantee that was really Bucky. “Don’t, Steve.”

“What?” Bucky sounded confused. 

The doorknob of the apartment rattled, and Natasha adjusted her stance, absolutely silent. She’d bet anything she knew who was going to come through that door. 

As the door splintered, she shone the flashlight at eye level at the intruder. It didn’t slow him down at all; as she’d expected, it was the Winter Soldier, in mask and goggles, and he came in through the door and dodged three bullets and deflected the third with his arm. 

“Run,” Natasha shouted, “run!” and flung herself down, sweeping his legs and shooting him in the calf. But he barely stumbled before he was up again and past her, into the bedroom; she leapt on him from behind and he caught her and smashed her against the doorframe before she could get her garrote into place. She kept hold of her pistol but lost the flashlight, and now the only light in the room was Steve’s flashlight, lying on the floor. 

The Winter Soldier loomed over her and she gripped the pistol, aiming at his face. It didn’t deter him. “Natalia,” he said, muffled by the mask. “Natalia.” 

“Don’t call me that,” she hissed. Someone leapt onto his back, either Steve or Bucky, and he staggered back; her bullet had hit his leg after all. She scrambled to her feet and the lights came back on. 

It was Bucky on the Soldier’s back, elbow wrapped around his neck and face set grimly; he’d missed his grip to break the Soldier’s neck and was trying to strangle him instead. The Soldier wasn’t fighting as hard as he should have been, and she realized that behind those goggles he was staring at Steve, who had his back to the window and his pistol up, and was trying to get a bead on him. 

Bucky was in the way, and the Soldier was working to keep it that way. Natasha could take his legs out and have him, but she paused for a moment, working through something in her mind. She knew the Soldier; if he wanted them dead, they’d already be. “Steve,” she said, “Steve, wait.”

Bucky gritted his teeth and adjusted his hold and the Soldier sank slowly to the floor. “Steve,” the Soldier said. “Steve.” He could have thrown Bucky off, but made no real attempt, only keeping one hand braced so Bucky couldn’t crush his windpipe.

Natasha stepped closer, purposely spoiling Steve’s shot. “Wait,” she said, and brought her gun up. The Soldier stared at her, expressionless behind the obstructions over his face, but after an instant he slowly bowed his head, a tremor going through his body. Bucky watched him, a strange glimmer of triumph crossing his face.

Natasha set the muzzle of her pistol against the middle of Bucky’s forehead, not the Soldier’s. 

“No!” Steve shouted, just as Bucky raised his eyes to her and snarled, something flashing green across his irises, and Natasha pulled the trigger and everything went black.

 

 

* * * 

 

 

“No,” Tony said, “you can’t use a defibrillator on a man with all that metal in him!”

“Well,” Dr. Montazeri said, frazzled, “you tell me what I am to do to save this man’s life!”

“This is Zola,” Yelena said from the monitor, pointing to a line in the text readout. “He used— one of the memory-erasing chairs— he just deleted your Barnes.”

“This is not happening,” Lakeisha said, realizing she had both hands wrapped around Sam’s arm. Bucky had looked bad enough before, unconscious, but he was visibly different, lips blue already, eyes glinting dully half-open.

“When you die in the game you die for real,” Yelena said, but she had the grace to look upset and furious. 

“He’s not even _in_ the game,” Tony said, disgusted. “He never even got a _chance_ — I _have_ to be able to fix this.”

“Use the control panel,” Wells said. “Natasha— could use the control panel. Barnes still has a player in the game.”

“Adrenaline,” Tony said, “give him adrenaline or something—“

“It is highly unlikely that would restore a functioning heart rhythm,” Dr. Montazeri snapped. 

“Can we use this thing to talk to them?” Wells asked Yelena. “If we tell her— look, that thing there, that sprite, whatever you call it— that’s Barnes, he’s not deleted, she just needs to activate it.”

“She does,” Yelena said, distant, preoccupied. 

“You can keep someone alive a long time with chest compressions,” Dr. Montazeri said grimly. “Cynthia, if you’d fetch me a bag.”

 

 

* * *

 

“Bucky,” Steve said brokenly, and she heard him moving in the darkness. “Bucky— Natasha, what happened? What the hell?”

He sounded angry now, baffled and wounded. “Steve,” she said, “that wasn’t Bucky.”

“It was him!” Steve insisted. She found her backup flashlight, tied to her calf, and turned it on. They were nowhere again, a glitch, alone.  

“You didn’t see his eyes,” Natasha said. 

Steve spun to face her, breathing hard with a high tight wheeze, gun still in his hand. “I don’t need to see his fucking eyes,” he said. 

She looked him up and down impassively. “This is why I was going to bring Yelena,” she said. “She knows how different it is in here. You don’t understand how the Mechtat works, Steve. You’re not suited to this sort of work.”

Steve froze, at that, and after a long moment, holstered his gun. “What, were they both Zola?” he said grudgingly. 

“No,” she said, “I didn’t think— but he should be here, if it was really Bucky.”

“But if you die in here you die for real,” Steve said. “If you killed him—“

“His body would be here if I killed him and he was really him,” Natasha said, rounding on him in exasperation. “I swear to God, Steve, if I have to throw you out of here I will.”

“No,” Steve said, subsiding with ill grace, but subsiding nonetheless. She’d take it. “No, I— I’m sorry.”

“You are not trained for this,” she said, relenting a little now that she could afford to concede. “But when I say you didn’t see his eyes, I mean you did not see when they changed color. He slipped and Zola was there.”

“That’s why you were telling me not to give him a pistol,” Steve said. He sounded sick. “But— Natasha, it was him.”

“It probably was,” she said. “I think it’s the same in here as it was out there, Steve— it’s Bucky, but Zola’s wound through him.”

“I thought we were gonna be able to separate them, in here,” Steve said, dismayed. 

“We are,” she said. “It’s just… not going to be all that easy.”

Steve chewed on his lower lip intently, clearly thinking. “How long has it been?” he asked. 

“Real time?” Natasha considered. “I doubt it’s even been an hour.”

Steve shoved his gun back into its holster and swung away to pace through the disconcerting nothingness. “We gotta,” he said, but trailed off, and stopped. He turned slowly, and came back toward her. “The— other him. The Winter Soldier. I assumed that was Zola but— I was distracted— toward the end, he was saying my name, wasn’t he.”

“Yes,” Natasha said. 

“Fuck,” Steve said, and turned away again. 

Natasha took a breath to speak, but stopped as in the distance the sound of the simulation spinning up throbbed through the floor. “Get ready,” she said, “we know Zola’s awake now,” and Steve drew his pistol again. 

But as the lights flickered up, it didn’t matter: they were in a white room, completely surrounded by about a dozen black-clad men with guns, all just substantial enough to make it plain that for the purposes of the simulation, they were real enough to kill. 

 

* * *

 

Steve followed Natasha, hands on his head, as the gunmen escorted them through white hallways. He’d fucked this up, it was on him. He didn’t know Yelena at all but she wouldn’t have been distracted by Bucky, wouldn’t have been distracted by the old apartment and his mother’s things. Natasha wouldn’t have known which apartment to check but that probably didn’t matter. He shouldn’t have come. Now they were trapped. 

They were marched through a metal door with a large wheel to lock it, and the men in black trooped back out and slammed the door behind themselves. The room was large and filled with esoteric old-fashioned science-type equipment. One figure stood next to a bank of controls, his back to them. Natasha was standing frozen, stock-still, staring at something, and it wasn’t the person. Steve followed her gaze to a large, curved-glass structure with metal banding, a large tube of some kind, cloudy with condensation and weirdly-lit, like it was full of liquid. 

And then Steve noticed the hand. A human hand was pressed against the inside of the glass. “Oh my God,” he said suddenly. 

“I have seen,” Natasha said hoarsely, “this place before.” 

The figure turned slowly, and looked at them, and it was the Winter Soldier, wearing an incongruous white lab coat and his goggles and mask. He had seemed slighter, facing the other way, but now he loomed, larger than life, inhuman with his face hidden. Steve swallowed hard, hands still up. “So if he’s over there, who’s in the tank?”

“There were other men who went in the tanks,” Natasha said, voice low. “But it is possible neither of them is really him.” 

It was then that Steve managed to focus on the man in the tank. He had dark hair and a familiar build. It was almost certainly Bucky. “Well,” Steve said, “shit.”

The Winter Soldier walked toward them slowly, unhesitating, emotionless, impossible to read. As he came closer he seemed to get bigger, towering over them, looming in silent implacable menace. 

But he was moving at an angle to them, and passed by— without pausing, without looking at them— and continued to another bank of complicated equipment on the far side of the room, away from the cryo tank. There was an ugly padded chair, and he climbed into it, and Natasha made a faint noise, though her body language betrayed nothing. 

Restraints snapped down around his wrists, arms, ankles, and thighs, and the chair tilted back a little, and Steve staggered back a little as Natasha turned abruptly away and crashed into his shoulder. But she wasn’t tackling him down or anything like that, she was just grabbing him to steady herself. “No,” she said quietly, “I— no.”

She was shaking. “What,” Steve said, and looked back over to see an apparatus lowering itself over Bu— the Winter Soldier’s head. Electricity crackled, and Natasha’s fingers tightened on his shoulders enough to bruise. 

“Memory wipe,” she said, “a memory wipe—“ and just then, horribly, Bucky started screaming. 

“Jesus Christ,” Steve said, sick, watching Bucky convulse, held in place by the restraints. And from the way Natasha was completely, completely still against him, she had gone through this herself. She wasn’t even shaking anymore. “Can we stop it?”

“No,” she said, “interrupting it is— almost as bad— sometimes worse—“ 

“The cryo tank,” Steve said, “if we break it, can we—“

“No,” she said. “No! He has to— there’s a procedure. If you don’t— even if you do— I’ve watched— I watched a man die, coming out of cryo, it’s the— it’s the worst thing—“ 

Steve set his jaw grimly, watching as Bu— as the Winter Soldier stopped convulsing and the apparatus detached. It swung back up and out of the way, and the Winter Soldier lay motionless, twitching occasionally. “I hope that neither of these is really him,” Steve said. He’d never seen Natasha upset, not like this. She was hanging onto him with a downright painful grip, not moving and not looking at anything. Would Yelena know what to do, here? He’d assumed he knew how to work with Natasha, but nothing in here was like he’d expected. 

Especially not Natasha. There was a different kind of logic to her here. And he really couldn’t believe he’d actually— not thinking about sex with Natasha had always been a kind of important boundary to him and he’d just, willy-nilly, blown past it, and that wasn’t like him or her, and something was wrong but he had no idea how to figure that out. 

Natasha breathed sharply in, let it out slowly, and straightened, looking him in the eye and loosening her grip on his shoulders. “We have to initiate the defrosting procedure,” she said. “I think it’s the only way we can go from here.”

“What about,” Steve said slowly, staring at the Winter Soldier, who still twitched intermittently. Natasha stepped away from him and went to a bank of controls near the cryo tank. Warily watching the Winter Soldier, Steve followed. 

He had to steel himself to look up at the cryo tank. It was absolutely Bucky in there, blank-faced and open-eyed, suspended completely motionless in greenish liquid, a mask with a tube covering his nose and mouth, his hair short and disarranged as if floating in liquid.

Natasha scanned the controls, and Steve tore his eyes away from Bucky’s horrible stillness to help her look. “Here,” she said, and flipped back the cover protecting a switch so she could move it to the downward position. 

There was a beep, then something whirred, spinning up into a deeper groan somewhere in the inner workings of the machine. The display lit up and readouts scrolled across it. “Did it work?” Steve asked nervously. 

“It’s… doing something,” Natasha said. “Temperature, that’s what this is.”

They stood awkwardly for a few minutes. Steve turned and watched the Winter Soldier, still motionless in the chair. Natasha frowned intently at the display.

Suddenly the cryo mechanism cranked to life with an ominous groan, and there was an unsettling rushing noise as of liquid. The level of green in the container started to drop, and the tube slowly, grindingly tilted. “Temperature’s coming up,” Natasha said, frowning. “I don’t know if it’s supposed to be that fast?”

“I don’t know anything about this,” Steve said helplessly. “Fuck.” He glanced over. The Winter Soldier was still now, lying as if dead, but it was impossible to tell with his mask on. The— whoever he was— in the tank was strapped to the back of the tank by his chest, so as the tube tipped to horizontal, he settled flat against the former back of the tank, now the bottom.

“He’s alive,” Natasha said, and glanced up. “Heart restarted.”

“His heart doesn’t beat in cryo,” Steve said, and of course it didn’t, he’d just never— he’d never really thought about it. 

“Respiration,” she said, “should be,” and she squinted at the figure. The chest moved a little, Steve thought. The liquid was draining away. There was a beep, and Natasha said, “Remove mask from subject as soon as tank opens,” clearly reading from her display. They exchanged a look. 

“I figured there’d be ice,” Steve said. 

“The liquid isn’t water,” Natasha said. “It’s just below freezing. Or, was. The temperature’s coming up really fast now.”

She was completely emotionless and blank, and he’d long ago learned that meant she was very upset. “You’ve seen this before?” Steve asked warily. 

“I watched a man die,” she said flatly. “All of his organs failed during defrosting. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

With another beep and a whoosh, the tank’s supports separated, and the curved glass face began to rise with the hiss of air-cushioned supports. “That’s reassuring,” Steve said. A humming noise began, and hot air blowers began to circulate, taking over from the liquid in the tube at the task of warming Bucky’s body.

“Take the mask off him,” Natasha said, “and turn him on his side, his lungs are full of fluid.”

“Fluid,” Steve said, startled. “Won’t that drown him?”

“It’s an oxygen-bearing PFC fluid,” Natasha said. “He’s going to have to clear it from his lungs before he can breathe air, but he’s going to be too weak to cough effectively. I’m told that even when it goes well this part is unpleasant at best.”

Steve grimaced, and climbed carefully over the railing, with a glance back at the Winter Soldier still in the chair. Still motionless, still unresponsive, still shackled to the chair. 

“Hurry up,” Natasha said, “he’s coming up to temp and he’s going to wake up suffocating.”

“Yes ma’am,” Steve said, leaning over the tank. It had separated into a kind of bier, and Bucky was lying like he was asleep, stark naked and with a metal left arm that didn’t look much like the one he’d had when Steve had fought him in D.C. This one looked older, and had a hydraulic cable down the back. Bucky’s hair was long, but not as long as in D.C. 

The mask fastened with a clip, so he unfastened it and pulled it loose. What looked like water started pouring out of Bucky’s mouth and nose, and Bucky spluttered weakly. Steve gritted his teeth and unfastened the strap around his chest, turning him onto his side, metal arm upward, with some effort— he was much smaller than Bucky now. 

Water gushed out for a moment, and then Bucky coughed wetly, and more or less vomited. The liquid had blood in it, distressingly. His eyes rolled open and his body convulsed as the liquid streamed out of his lungs, and Steve held him, grimacing. 

Bucky dragged in a ragged breath, choked again, and coughed a little more strongly, gasping and retching and convulsing. It was a long time before he managed to draw a full breath, and he arched his head back with it, eyes open and unseeing and hands blindly grasping. 

“Bucky,” Steve said, “I gotcha, it’s okay, hey.”

Bucky vomited again, mostly water but some blood, and Steve held him gently by the shoulders as he curled in on himself, gasping and shaking. He was managing to make distressed noises, and as he got more of his lung capacity back they came closer and closer to being screams. He was clearly in agony, completely incoherent with it.

“Careful,” Natasha said, “his skin is probably pretty raw.”

“Great,” Steve muttered. 

“Temperature is good,” Natasha said, “approaching normal, he’ll be warm enough to shiver soon.”

Bucky’s human hand found one of Steve’s and grabbed onto him, weakly. Steve folded his fingers to hold him better, and said, “I gotcha,” carefully stroking the wet hair out of Bucky’s face. Bucky didn’t seem to be able to focus his eyes, staring wide-eyed like a newborn. 

“This was how the man died,” Natasha said, not looking at them. “At this stage. His heart started beating, he started breathing, but there’d been too much damage. His lungs started sloughing tissue, his skin split, and he died trying and failing to scream.”

“Fuck,” Steve hissed. In his lap, Bucky coughed weakly, and his body tried to curl in on itself but he could barely move. “Was it like this every time?”

“He’s doing better than the other guy already,” Natasha said. Steve wanted to comfort her, but he also was busy feeling like absolute shit at finding out yet one more piece of how badly Bucky had suffered. Because it was unlikely anyone had ever sat with him like this before, had ever tried to comfort him during this horrible process. And Steve had thought his own defrosting was bad— but he’d slept through it. He hadn’t slept through the freezing, that had been horrible, but this was clearly worse. 

“I don’t know why I assumed that they had a _good_ cryo-freeze process,” Steve muttered. 

Bucky whimpered, turning his face to Steve’s lap. He was getting a little stronger already, or just used to it; he squeezed Steve’s hand a little harder and managed something closer to a full breath.

“Nothing they did was good,” Natasha said viciously. 

Bucky writhed violently, sucking in a deep breath, and wheezed, “No— look out— no—“ 

“Don’t try to talk, Barnes,” Natasha said, not unsympathetically.

Steve glanced up, wondering what Bucky could possibly mean, and was alarmed to note that the Winter Soldier was gone from the chair. “Fuck,” he said, whipping his head around to look for him. 

Natasha followed the direction of his gaze, yanking one of her pistols out of its holster, but she was too slow; the Winter Soldier was directly behind her, and hit her so hard in the face she staggered and fell, dropping her pistol. 

Steve jumped to his feet, leaving Bucky to curl into a ball, and drew his pistol. The Winter Soldier slapped it out of his hand and drew a gun of his own, bringing it to bear. 

“I wouldn’t try it,” the Soldier said, voice muffled. 

It wasn’t Bucky’s voice. 

“No,” Bucky gasped, from his curled position. “N— no—“

The Winter Soldier reached down with his metal arm and hauled Natasha upright, keeping the gun pointed at Steve. Natasha was semiconscious, groggily trying to get her bearings. “Stop it,” Steve said, knowing it was futile. He really didn’t want the Soldier to start shooting, but he also was pretty sure whatever he was going to do to Natasha wasn’t good. 

“It’s better this way,” the Soldier said, and this time Steve could identify the voice. 

Zola.

The Soldier dragged Natasha away, walking slowly backward, gun still trained on Steve. “No,” Bucky whimpered, and Steve stepped back so he could see Bucky and the Soldier at the same time. Bucky was shivering, trying to push himself up. 

Natasha dropped her shoulder and rolled, an expert move that should have worked, but the Soldier held onto her easily, not wavering, and hauled her back up with a gesture that made her seem weightless. 

Steve figured out where they were going about the same time Natasha did: the chair. Natasha groaned, a heartfelt noise like Steve had never heard her make, and began to struggle wildly. It didn’t make sense, Steve thought; he’d seen Natasha fight the Soldier before, and she’d done a lot better than this. But, he was continually finding out, normal rules didn’t always apply in here. 

For one, the Soldier was bigger than Bucky ever had been. It wasn’t just his altered perspective, Steve was sure of it— the Soldier was at least six-four right now, and he knew even after being changed Bucky was barely over six feet. He was enormous.

Zola was altering reality to suit him. And that meant Natasha had no chance in hell of escaping him. She resorted to clawing at him, trying to kick his knee back, ripping at his face mask and goggles, but the gun he had pointed at Steve never wavered, nor did his progress toward the chair. 

Bucky managed to get up as far as his elbow, shaking violently, then vomited blood and curled up again. Steve started toward him in alarm, keeping an eye on the Soldier’s reaction, and stopped short when the Soldier paused to take better aim, an obvious prelude to firing. 

“Not so brave without Erskine’s serum,” Zola said. Natasha ripped his mask off, and it sure looked like Bucky’s mouth. “Stop, little girl, this is for your own good,” he said, betraying annoyance, and with that he shoved Natasha down into the chair and punched her, hard, in the face. Her head lolled back and she went limp, and Steve scooted forward in that instant of distraction to stand right next to Bucky. The thing he was lying on was about knee-height from the floor, and Steve eyed it, trying to see if there was any shelter to be had there. If he could get behind it, to fire from cover, he’d have time to draw the other pistol— but he’d have to get Bucky off it, get him to cover too. Either way, though, his lifespan was likely to be measurable in seconds, because Zola didn’t look like he was all that susceptible to bullets at this point. 

“You can’t even play fair,” Steve said. “C’mon, this can’t even be that fun for you.”

“Your big mouth,” Bucky panted indistinctly. He still wasn’t breathing all that well. “Christ, Rogers.”

Unhurriedly, Zola pressed his hand against the middle of Natasha’s chest, and the restraints of the chair snapped into place around her arms and legs. She looked so small, so slight, so helpless, her nose and mouth streaming blood and her eyelids fighting to open. 

“I’m above those sorts of considerations, Captain Rogers,” Zola said. “It is impossible to have a fair fight against me. I am a genius, after all.”

It was obscene, watching Bucky’s mouth make Zola’s voice. He wasn’t Bucky, though, he clearly wasn’t. Steve still wasn’t sure how Natasha had known before, but this was pretty unambiguous. 

“I dunno,” Steve said, “I’ve known plenty of geniuses in my time, and usually the only way to get them to do something is if it’s fun. They’re the worst at motivation.”

“Perhaps,” Zola said, unperturbed. With the goggles on it was impossible to tell where he was looking. “Having the last Black Widow at my mercy, along with you, and my chance to finally destroy the last remnants of Sergeant Barnes? I suppose you could call that fun.”

“The last Black Widow,” Steve said blankly. No she wasn’t. Did Zola know that? Would knowing that change anything? Was it strategic knowledge? “And it’s not like I have the serum, it’s not like you can use me.”

“Not in here, no,” Zola said, “but you can’t think I won’t do this to you next. And if I control your consciousness, I control your body, serum or no.”

So Natasha was getting the chair first. What would it do to her? She moved her head feebly, blinking, and he saw her jerk her feet and realize she was restrained. “This is bad,” Steve said softly. “This is real bad. Tony, you gotta see that this is bad.” Surely Tony could shut it down. Coming in here to fight Zola had been a terrible idea. 

“Tony’s the operator?” Bucky asked, in a murmur. 

“And Yelena,” Steve said. He wasn’t going to bring up the HYDRA woman. 

“Don’t think they know how to pull us out,” Bucky said.

“You are in a bad way, gentlemen,” Zola said smugly, and turned his head to press a button on the complicated control interface next to the chair. 

Natasha thrashed, silent and determined, as a big circular metal clamp descended toward her head. She was small enough to twist, to a degree, within the confines of the restraints, and she moved far enough that the clamp stuttered, caught, and retracted rather than coming down on her head.

Zola leaned over and planted his metal hand in the middle of her chest, forcing her back into the proper position as the clamp descended again. She struggled, dislocating a thumb and freeing an arm, but she couldn’t move far enough to avoid the clamp this time. 

Something stirred next to Steve’s leg, and his thigh holster suddenly lightened. The muzzle blast knocked him sideways and he staggered, ears ringing. 

Zola reeled back, and Steve scrambled madly for one of the discarded pistols on the floor. He scrabbled up the closer one and shot Zola as Bucky fired again. Bucky missed, but Steve didn’t, and Zola staggered back a pace. Steve wasn’t much of a shot in this body after all, but at this range it didn’t matter; he’d shot the gun straight out of Zola’s hand with little trouble. 

“You’ll kill him,” Zola said. “Do you want that?”

“Yes,” Bucky said hoarsely. He was sitting up, shaking violently, holding the pistol in both hands and struggling to bring it to bear on Zola again. “Fuck you,” he managed to say, and his nose was bleeding as freely as Natasha’s. 

“I got him,” Steve said, and shot Zola in the chest. 

“Headshot,” Bucky said, letting his arm fall, nearly collapsing. “Get a headshot. No good without a headshot.”

“Yeah okay,” Steve said, reluctant, but he advanced to where Zola had fallen back against the wall, reeling. He raised the pistol and shot Zola in the chest again. “Headshot, Steve,” Bucky said, stronger. “That’s not me. Do it.”

Steve couldn’t do it. Zola yanked the goggles off and stared at him with Bucky’s face, stark white and shocked, blood coming from his mouth. “Steve,” Zola said. 

Natasha screamed, and it cut off abruptly. “Shit,” Steve said, and ran to the chair. The thing had clamped down onto her head and was emitting some kind of sparks or something. Frantic, Steve fired blindly into the control interface, twice, three times. The clamp released Natasha’s head, and Steve pried at the restraints around the arm she hadn’t freed with his free hand. Finally they released. 

Natasha fell out of the chair as Steve pulled on her. “Shit,” Steve said again, “shit, shit,” and lowered her to the ground. She was shuddering, maybe seizing, and he kept the pistol in his hand, kept his eye on the Winter Soldier, held her as best he could. 

“Steve,” she said, shivering, “Steve—“ 

The lights went out, and Steve braced himself in the total darkness. 

“Glitch?” he asked breathlessly, when nothing happened.

“Glitch,” Natasha said, inhaling with a gasp. 

“Bucky?” Steve ventured. “If he’s here, will we hear him?” 

“I’m here,” Bucky said weakly. “What the fuck.”

“It’s a glitch,” Steve said. He fumbled for his flashlight. “Shit.”

“I have one on my belt,” Natasha said. “Left. Lower, that’s my boob.” She managed a laugh. 

Steve switched the flashlight on and swung it around. There was no sign of the lab, no sign of the Winter Soldier, but there— over there was Bucky, half-curled on the ground. 

“Jesus fuck,” Bucky said, struggling to sit up. “Jesus. I forgot how bad that _sucked_.”

“I did not,” Natasha said. She struggled up as well, and Steve helped her get up and stagger over to Bucky. “James,” she said, and she was crying. She put out her arms and pulled Bucky’s head against her chest, and Bucky threaded his arms around her waist. “James. Oh God.” She was shaking.

“Did they use the chair on you?” Bucky asked, in Russian. 

“Only once, I think,” Natasha said, then laughed bitterly, “but I don’t remember. We were all terrified of it.”

“What did it do in here?” Bucky asked. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t— I know it came down on me, I know it hurt, but I don’t remember, there was suddenly this glitch and we’re here. I don’t know.”

Steve remembered her dislocated thumb and found her hand, pulling it up to check on it. It was fine. “Wait,” he said. 

“Sometimes injuries don’t persist,” Natasha said. “Sometimes they only last until the next glitch, sometimes they reset when you stop paying attention to them, sometimes they continue until you get out. It depends on the operator.”

“Huh,” Steve said, squinting. “But if you die in here you die for real. So did we kill Zola, just now?”

“You didn’t shoot him in the fucking head,” Bucky said, raising his face from Natasha’s shoulder. “I know what kind of specs the Winter Soldier’s body’s got, you wouldn’t have registered as a kill for sure without the headshot.”

“You could survive getting shot four times in the chest,” Steve said. “Point-blank. Large caliber.” He had a m1911a Colt .45 like he’d always carried. It felt enormous in his hand, and the kick was enough to knock him back every time. 

“Yes,” Bucky said. “I have.”

Steve stared at him. “Well,” he said. “He’s not here.” He gestured. 

“No,” Bucky said, “he’s not. But that doesn’t tell you anything except that there wasn’t any of me in that body, like I fucking _told_ you.”

“If I jump the gun and kill you, then we’ll have come in here for nothing,” Steve said. “The whole point is to try to get you out.”

“I don’t think we killed him,” Natasha said quietly.

Bucky closed his eyes and leaned his head down against Natasha’s shoulder again. She was shaking less. He held his arm out and yanked Steve in, making it a three-way embrace. Steve let go of his pistol and wrapped his arms around both of them. 

“If you can’t get me out,” Bucky said, “you can’t— if you can’t separate him outta me— he said there wasn’t any way—“

“I’m not about to take his word for anything,” Steve said. Light flickered across his vision and he blinked, confused. Neither of the others reacted, not even when the light repeated— an overall flash of brightness that stung his eyes. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” Bucky asked, raising his head. 

“That,” Steve said, “that light— ow!”

“Oh,” Natasha said, “shit.”

 

“Ow,” Steve said again, sitting up groggily— oh. Oh. He was— he was himself, in the Tower. In the lab they’d been in. With no shirt on, sitting on a gurney. He felt enormous, his shoulders an alien framework like a plow blade. “Ow, what the—“ 

“Steve,” Sam said, “you reckless son of a bitch. What the hell were you doing? You shot Bucky  like _five times_.”

Steve looked over. Natasha was next to him, still and sedated, wearing a sports bra and jeans and as many electrodes as he himself still was, but as he watched, her eyebrows pulled together and her eyelids pinched. Next to her was Bucky, shirtless and bandaged and dead-white except the dark bruises that had come up from his run-in with the drill press. 

“Wasn’t Bucky,” he said, rubbing his face groggily. Anaesthetic had him still sluggish. “I— what happened?”

“I yanked you out of there,” Tony said. “I tried to do it before you murdered anybody, or before Natasha got fucking electrocuted, but things happen pretty fuckin’ fast in there and it’s not the most responsive program.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, “I feel that.”

Bucky was coming to, Steve noticed; he wasn’t giving any real sign but his heart monitor had picked up a little and he was breathing carefully, deliberately. “Well,” Dr. Montazeri said, “he didn’t die again, so it must not really have been him you shot.”

“It wasn’t him,” Steve said. “It wasn’t him when Natasha shot him either. _That’s_ him, now.”

Bucky took a deep breath and shoved himself up on an elbow, startling the doctor. “You didn’t kill Zola, Steve,” he said. “I know you didn’t kill him.”

“Well,” Steve said, “is he in you?”

Bucky stared at him, stricken. God, he looked awful, circles under his eyes and blood on his face. “I don’t know,” he said. 

Tony came up next to him and gestured a holoscreen into existence, then held a little device up. “Gonna put this behind your head,” Tony said, “don’t startle and hit me or anything.”

“Okay,” Bucky said. 

Tony held the device a couple of inches away from the base of Bucky’s skull. “How you feelin’, BarnesBot?”

“Like if you cut all the metal out of me I still wouldn’t be human,” Bucky said. His eyes suddenly snapped to Steve. “Clint. I hit him with a syringe full of horse tranquilizers. Did it kill him?”

“No,” Dr. Montazeri said gently, “he will be all right. He is resting comfortably and will have no lasting ill effects.”

Bucky let out a slow shuddering breath. “Thank fuck,” he said. 

“I don’t get any kind of reading like Zola’s in there,” Tony said. 

Bucky breathed in slowly, then out slowly, and began picking the electrodes off himself. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He nodded slowly. “We didn’t kill him, though. I know we fucking didn’t.”

“I shot him a whole bunch of times,” Steve said. 

Natasha was stirring, coming up more gradually than either of them, and she seemed to be fighting grogginess with a lot more difficulty. “You killed him,” she said, slurring her words a little. “You got him, Steve.”

Steve frowned at her. “That’s not what you said just now,” he pointed out. 

“I don’t remember,” she said, managing to get a hand to her face to push at the middle of her forehead like she had a headache. With great effort, she pushed herself upright and started peeling electrodes off. 

Steve picked off his own electrodes with practiced ease— he’d spent a lot of time with electrodes glued to him, he reflected— and yanked his t-shirt back on over his head. “Well,” he said, remembering to glare at the HYDRA woman, who was absorbed in the screen with the readouts, along with Yelena. “I guess we’ll find out where he went. Can’t JARVIS go in there after him?”

“That’s a thought,” Tony said, “and it’s a thought I’ve been working on. JARVIS has been learning as much as he can through the Mechtat machine but he’s also been a little distracted restoring himself from backups, so. We’re not there quite yet.”

“At least he’s out of Bucky,” Steve said, climbing to his feet. “Right?”

“Looks that way,” Tony said. Bucky was sitting hunched on his gurney, arm wrapped around his midsection, bare feet dangling. He looked so tired, and so frail. Steve brought his sweatshirt over and handed it to him.

“You look cold, Buck,” he said, and helped put it on him. Bucky pulled it closed and shivered. 

“Thanks,” he said quietly. 

“That wasn’t,” Steve said, and paused uncomfortably. “Cryo wasn’t, was it really like that?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. He scrubbed his hand through his hair, disarranging it dramatically, then leaned over and pressed his forehead against Steve’s shoulder. Steve wrapped his arms around him, so grateful to touch him he was past caring about anyone watching them. “I hated it,” he said, very quietly. “Every time I wished it would kill me. It never did.”

“It never did, Buck,” Steve said, savagely angry. “And you fucking beat them, in the end.”

“I wish I was sure of that, Steve,” Bucky said. He repeated it, softer, and it would have been inaudible to anyone with standard hearing. “I wish I was sure of that.”


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here is half a chapter, because given my schedule, I have no idea how much longer it'll take me to get the back half of it done and I want to update this. 
> 
> In which pretty much every single commenter was right about the last chapter and here we decide what to do about that.   
> Also, in which Sam and Steve have a really wordy discussion about their relationship, which I sort of don't know where that came from but it demanded to be included.   
> This at least just sets up, rather than destroying everything and leaving you to wallow in the aftermath for god knows how long while I screw around with real life. The rest of the chapter will be the conclusion of the story, so I know it's gonna take me a bit to get that right.

Sam drank Tony Stark’s beer and watched Steve pet Bucky’s hair. Bucky was half-asleep in Steve’s lap, but was still watching the room from under heavy eyelids, with unfocused eyes. He looked small, swathed in an oversized hoodie and curled up like a wounded animal. Steve’s hand never stopped moving in his hair, firm and gentle and reassuring. 

Steve was just watching everyone else, quiet and seemingly contented except for the way he still glared sometimes at the HYDRA woman, who was still going over schematics with Yelena. Yelena had a tumbler of vodka in her hand but Sam doubted it was full-strength, the way she was swilling it. 

Natasha was ignoring Tony, Steve, Sam himself, Yelena— she was, of all people, talking to Bruce, and seemed to be flirting with him, of all things. Sam had to reserve judgement on that, but it was weird and seemed to have come out of nowhere. But then, he hadn’t been around that much, and Bruce hadn’t really been in town when he’d last been around, so maybe this was a long-term thing. 

Still. Maybe it was worth poking at. Natasha had given him a lot of grief, this last little while. “Natasha and Bruce?” Sam said quietly to Steve. 

Steve took a slightly deeper breath, not looking up. “Sam,” he said. “In the— in the machine thing.” It had the air of him preparing to reveal something he was ashamed of. Great. 

“I thought nobody remembered what happened inside the machine,” Sam said, bracing himself. 

Steve shrugged. “I do,” he said. “I remember all of it. Some of it’s kind of… well, it’s all weird, like it was a dream—“ 

“It was, kinda,” Sam said. 

“Well,” Steve said. “Right.” He fidgeted with his beer bottle. “Well. I um.”

“Man you know whatever you did in there, it wasn’t real,” Sam said. He’d read the logs along with the others, and understood basically none of it except what Tony parsed out of it. “Were you back to your old self though?”

“I was,” Steve said, with a rueful laugh. “I was smaller than Natasha. It was weird.”

“Do you still dream that way?” Sam asked. It was something he’d thought of before, watching some of the odd notes of Steve’s body language and mannerisms. He was trying to squash a little jolt of jealousy; he wanted to go in that machine and see Steve small. But it wasn’t worth the danger, and anyway the machine wasn’t recreational, and it was a dumb thought. But he still sort of wanted to.

Steve was quiet for a long moment, petting Bucky’s hair. Bucky’s eyes had slid closed. He was still fighting it, Sam could tell from his breathing, but he was horribly exhausted, there was no way he was gonna be able to stay awake much longer. “Yeah,” he said. “It— there are a lot of days I wake up and my, my whole body is weird and I gotta get used to it again.”

“I notice you almost runnin’ into doors,” Sam said. He smoothed his hand across the middle of Steve’s back. “That’s gotta be super weird.”

“It is,” Steve said, “but I’m used to it.” He leaned into Sam’s touch, and Sam kept it up, rubbing soothingly across the middle of his back. Steve really ought to talk to a therapist and stop accepting all the shitty things he claimed to be “used to”, but that was a fight for perhaps another day. Sam had to fly home in like three hours, he wasn’t going to fight with Steve about anything.

“Wish I coulda seen it,” Sam said, giving in to the temptation to articulate it. “I just feel like that would be so wild, to be bigger than you.”

Steve didn’t laugh. “Probably,” he said absently. Bucky’s breathing was evening out. “Natasha thought so.”

“Oh,” Sam said, “I bet.”

“She,” Steve said, and Sam noticed now that he was blushing. “We— in the machine, there was a, the thing shut down. And we, um. For a while there was nothing, and there was nothing to do, and so, um. We… passed the time…”

Sam got it. “Ohhhh,” he said, his hand stilling on Steve’s back as a jolt of startled arousal shot through his gut. “Oh man. Oh really?” Jesus that would be hot. Tiny Steve and Natasha. God _damn_.

“We had sex,” Steve managed, blushing furiously. 

“Oh _man_ ,” Sam said. He’d expected making out, maybe. He’d expected some kind of fooling around. But that was pretty unambiguous. And holy shit, that was hot.

“I wouldn’t have,” Steve persisted, stammering a little, “I— but it was so strange in there, and it just, it, things had their own logic. And it seemed like it would be okay.”

“Was it good?” Sam asked. 

Steve blinked at him. “Well,” he said, momentarily derailed, “yeah, but—“ He recovered, and his expression went stern. “I didn’t mean to do that to you, Sam.” 

“You can do it to me anytime,” Sam said, then caught up. “Wait, are you _apologizing_?”

“Yes,” Steve said stiffly. 

“Why?” Sam blinked at him. “Dude I told you, you do what you gotta do, I got faith that you’ll come back to me if you wanna. You were in a dream machine in a different body with a crazy AI and the possible-ghost of your best pal, I’m gonna complain if you virtually fuck the hottest woman I’ve ever seen on this Earth?”

Steve stared at him. “You said it was okay if I made out with Bucky sometimes if it seemed to help him,” he said carefully. “Not slept with a coworker. I feel like that’s different.”

“Nah,” Sam said. “I mean, I figure in real life you’d run it by me first, but in special circumstances, I’m not gonna get too worked up over it. And anyway she’s not just a coworker.”

Steve mulled that over for a moment. “Would,” he said, then hesitated, chewing the inside of his lip. “Would you sleep with other people too?” He shot Sam a look before looking back down. “Like, are we just—“

“I’d talk it over with you first if I wanted to,” Sam said. “Listen. Steve. It’s not…” He collected himself, and sighed. He hadn’t really come equipped to have The Talk. “Look. Have you researched polyamory at all, in all your Internet perambulations?”

Steve frowned. “No,” he said slowly, but he definitely knew what the word was, from the glimmer of recognition in his eye. He was drawing a conclusion, for sure. That was kind of a relief; Sam just had to steer him right. 

“Well, so it’s a thing. It’s kind of… it’s a spectrum of orientations, right? Like being gay or bi or straight. There’s another axis, where you’re poly or demi or ace, kinda. Ring a bell?”

“Not… maybe,” Steve said. “I didn’t… I feel like… what’s the difference between polyamory and cheating on someone?”

“Communication,” Sam said. 

“I don’t think,” Steve said, pausing as he worked his way through it mentally. It gave the impression that he wasn’t very smart, but Sam knew better; he was thinking this through on a whole bunch of levels at once. “Are you polyamorous?”

“No,” Sam said, “I’m not, really. That’s just not how I’m wired. I usually just want one person at once. I think that’s not a hard line for me, maybe I would consider it with the right people. Maybe not! But what I _am_ , is not particularly jealous. I’m perfectly willing to have someone be my only partner, who has other partners.”

“I’m,” Steve said, thinking furiously. “I’m not polyamorous, though. Is that what you’re getting at? That I’d…”

“You clearly love Bucky,” Sam said. “You clearly— I mean, maybe I’m jumping the gun on that, but you’re obviously pretty attached to me, and pretty committed to making things work out. Which I’m psyched about, by the way. But I’d be an idiot if I didn’t think you loved Natasha too.”

“Like a sister,” Steve protested, but it was a little half-hearted. 

“No,” Sam said, “no way, or you wouldn’t have banged her.”

“It wasn’t really like real life, though,” Steve said. “It was like if I dreamed I… okay, even finishing that sentence sounds creepy, but, I mean, that’s what I’m getting at.”

“Would you do it again?” Sam asked. Steve started to answer, but Sam interrupted to clarify first. “I mean, if I wasn’t in the picture for whatever reason. And you’re over it and you’re free and out in the world and on your own, and Natasha shows up and says hey Steve, I’m bored and lonely and you look like you are too?”

Steve gave him a look, but when Sam raised his eyebrows, Steve rolled his eyes and resignation and actually thought about it. 

“C’mon,” Sam said, as Steve hesitated. “For real? Man, her ass is fan-fuckin’-tastic, her sense of humor is wicked, and you know you can trust her to have your back no matter what. You’re crazy if you say no, you don’t find someone like that just hanging around.”

“I probably wouldn’t say no,” Steve admitted. “That is, if you really— if you didn’t—“

“All right, I knew you weren’t a crazy person,” Sam said. “So I’m saying this as someone who’s very much in the picture, I’m totally fine if you do that. I’m totally fine. I just want to be kept in the loop.”

Steve looked over at him. “I gotta think that over,” he said. “I don’t know…” He grimaced. “I don’t know if I really, if I’d really be okay doing that. I… I mean, for me.”

“Don’t let guilt and shame stop you,” Sam said. “If your heart inclines a way that good communication could actually take you, you should do that.”

“Huh,” Steve said. 

Sam laughed. “Did I just rock your world?”

“You rock my world all the time,” Steve said, and it was the most adorably Steve thing he’d ever said and Sam just had to lean over and kiss him.

Bucky sat up suddenly, bleary-eyed, staring blankly around the room. He nearly clocked Steve in the chin with his head, so there was some flailing to avoid it, which separated Sam from Steve. “Hey,” Steve said, amused and self-conscious. 

Sam sat back, taking his cue from Steve. “You all right?” he said, concerned at Bucky’s expression. He didn’t think Steve had told Bucky about them, and this was awkward, but Bucky didn’t look upset. He looked fucking terrified. 

“Zola,” Bucky said, panting. “I-- he’s-- he’s not in me anymore-- is he?”

“We got him out,” Steve said, frowning. 

Bucky put his hand to his own chest, groping as if trying to find something. “He was,” he said breathlessly, “he-- I got the--” He was breathing hard, and after a moment he sucked in a deeper breath, held it a second, and breathed out slowly, shaky. “Was I asleep?”

“Just for a couple minutes,” Steve said.

Bucky’s eyes focused on something across the room as he slid his hand down lower and found the bandages under his shirt where Zola had plugged in his wifi adapter or whatever the hell that thing had been. Lakeisha had been pretty disturbed by it and hers had been the clearest account of any of them. From Bucky’s expression, he was pretty disturbed by it too. Sam had seen the puddle of wires and blood and decided not to look any closer.

Sam followed his gaze. He was watching Natasha, who was still deep in conversation with Bruce, who was looking down shyly. “Fuck,” Bucky said, soft and heartfelt. 

“Natasha was in there with us,” Steve said, carefully. “She helped get Zola out of your head.”

Bucky nodded absently, his gaze still fixed on Natasha. “Yeah, I,” he said, then interrupted himself, eyebrows drawing together. “Fuck.”

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “Take a moment. You got a lot more sleep to catch up on.”

Bucky didn’t seem to hear him, still staring fixedly at Natasha. He rubbed his face, and shook his head, blinking hard, then pushed unsteadily to his feet, slipping out of Steve’s lap. 

“Bucky,” Steve said.

Bruce looked up as Bucky approached, but Bucky wasn’t looking at him. “Hey,” Bruce said, “are you doing okay?”

“No,” Bucky said. Natasha looked up at him then, and her expression flashed briefly on an uncharacteristic look of annoyance before settling into a mask of distant amusement.

“Barnes,” she said, “you look deranged.”

“Get out of her,” Bucky said, planting his feet to stand as straight and grounded as he could. It was a fighting stance, weight forward on the balls of his feet, even though his body was unbalanced by the lack of an arm and he was still shaky and unsteady. He looked about as combat-ready as a newborn lamb. 

Steve shot to his feet and was by Bucky’s side in an instant. “Zola’s not in her,” he said. “I talked to Tony for almost an hour as we tried to work it out from the logs, from scans-- she doesn’t have the cybernetic implants, Bucky.”

“He’s in there,” Bucky said, setting his jaw.

“It’s impossible,” Natasha said, shaking her head with a smile. “The great Tony Stark said so himself.”

Sam stood up, edging carefully along the side of the couch to flank Bucky’s other side. Shit was about to get real and he wasn’t as practiced at restraint holds as he should be. 

“But where did he go, then?” the HYDRA chick asked, looking up from the virtual tablet she was working on. “He isn’t gone, I can promise you that.”

“That’s what I’ve been working on,” Tony’s voice said, from a window on her screen; it popped up to show Tony’s holographic face.

“He is certainly not gone,” Yelena said. 

“But he can’t be in me,” Natasha said. “He used me as a bridge to get somewhere.”

“That has to be it,” Tony said, “but I can’t figure out how or where, since the virtual logic isn’t, you know, real.”

“That’s a dilemma,” Steve said, meeting Sam’s gaze. Bucky was still standing, tense and ready, within striking distance of Natasha. Sam raised his eyebrows, and Steve jerked his chin down a little: ready?

Sam nodded but held up one hand: wait.

Bucky lowered his eyes from Natasha briefly, and Sam realized he was scoping them both out in his peripheral vision. He knew where they were and had picked up on their communication with one another. Shit. He was good. He was maybe fresh out of surgery and down an arm and a bunch of shoulder bones and like a pint and a half of blood, but he was also the Winter fucking Soldier and they maybe needed to de-escalate this shit. 

“Hey,” Sam said, “let’s chill out for a minute, hey?”

Bucky resumed his fixed focus on Natasha, not relaxing one iota. “I know you think I’m stupid,” he said quietly, “but I know what you’re trying to do.”

Natasha looked around the room, eyebrows raised in mystification. “What I’m trying to do,” she said. 

“You can fight him, Natasha,” Bucky said. “If I could do it, you can. You’re stronger than me. You just have to time it right. You can’t resist him for long.”

“He’s not in me,” Natasha said. “Jim, he’s not.”

Jim? That was a new one on Sam. He bit his lip and looked at Steve, whose jaw tightened. 

“Bucky,” Steve said softly. “You need to stand down.”

Bucky took a deep breath and let it out slowly, but it wasn’t a calming breath; it reminded Sam a lot more of the way a marksman breathed as he squeezed the trigger-- on a smooth exhale, between heartbeats-- 

Even though he was expecting it, it was too fast for Sam to keep up. Bucky jumped between Natasha and Bruce, Natasha brought up one of her Widow’s Bites, Steve grabbed Bucky and both of them got shocked and thrown clear. Natasha rolled to her feet and went after Bucky, who was up and moving unsteadily but purposefully, an objective clearly in mind. She tagged him with the Widow’s Bite again, and he dropped to a knee and yanked her down with him. But she grappled past him and hit--

Fuck, she hit Bruce with the Widow’s Bite. Or Bucky did, with her arm. It didn’t really matter which. Bruce had been Bucky’s objective.

Steve grabbed the convulsing Bruce and yanked him safely out of the way. “Bucky,” he yelled, and Sam realized from his angle it hadn’t been clear who had control of the taser either.

“Shit,” Tony’s hologram said, “shit shit shit, containment protocol,” and Bruce threw Steve off with a whole lot too much strength, staggering sideways.

“Fuck me sideways,” Sam said, and leapt after Steve, who’d hit a wall pretty hard and was clearly dazed. 

Panels dropped from the ceiling just as Steve jumped on Bruce again, and Sam scrambled back to keep from getting squashed. Bruce and Steve disappeared behind the newly-appeared wall, and JARVIS said, “Containment protocol deployed.”

“Steve’s stuck in there with the Hulk,” Sam yelled, slamming his fist on the wall, but there was no help for it. He’d read up-- the only Avengers who had any kind of chance against the Hulk were Tony with appropriate gizmos, and Thor. Anyone else was likely to get turned into hamburger. 

Including and especially Steve.

But that was clearly Zola’s plan, to distract them with the Hulk-- the crucial question was whether he was acting via Bucky or Natasha. And as much as Sam wanted to believe Bucky was really free, he couldn’t really bank on it. 

And now Sam didn’t have Steve to help him subdue Bucky, or Natasha— and didn’t have him to help determine which of them he needed to restrain.

Natasha had managed to climb on top of Bucky and brought the Widow’s Bite down on his chest, shocking him over and over-- she was looking for a specific spot. He made no sound, but thrashed grimly, less incapacitated by it than a normal person would have been. Sam was grimly certain he himself would’ve been dead by now with that kind of treatment. With only one arm, he was no match for her dexterity. Natasha was looking for a subcutaneous implant that would shut him down, Sam guessed, mind going to the scan of Bucky’s torso he’d seen with all those thick white spots indicating cybernetics.

Yelena leapt into the fray, wrestling them deftly apart, and wound up crouching between them. Natasha stood, knees bent, ready to spring, with the Bite flaring blue in one hand, and Bucky was on his knees on the other side of Yelena, shuddering violently. 

“Which one is Zola in?” Sam said, watching as Yelena looked from one of them to the other. Bucky tried to get to his feet, breathing hard, hand clutched across his chest. “We should probably just take them both down, huh?” The odds still weren’t good; Sam had no illusions that he was genuinely a match for even a half-dead Winter Soldier, given that they were trying not to injure him further.

Bucky nodded, grimacing. “G-g-get S-steve,” he managed through gritted teeth. 

The wall parted and retracted into the ceiling and floor, revealing Steve standing unharmed, if a bit rumpled, and Bruce kneeling with his head pressed against a remaining wall panel, breathing hard, shirt torn, but skin still visibly pink. 

“You’re okay,” Sam said, shocked. 

“Bruce is amazing,” Steve said, and without hesitation he leapt out and tackled Bucky to the floor.

Yelena was facing off with Natasha. “I’m fine,” Natasha said, breathing hard, “I was just trying to stop him.”

“I got him,” Steve said, an elbow around Bucky’s throat from behind, his arm spread out in a sturdy submission hold. Of course Steve had practiced restraint holds. It stood to reason. Bucky’s head was tipped back against Steve’s shoulder, and his expression was serenely resigned. He was still trembling from the electric shocks.

Tony ran in through the door, finally on site from wherever he’d been. “Bruce,” he said. “Bruce, good Lord, are you--”

“Fine,” Bruce gritted out, “fine, go-- deal with that.”

“Get me a sedative,” Steve said. “Bucky, I promise, we’ll really get him this time. Whatever it takes.”

“Whatever it takes,” Bucky echoed, and he looked like one of those creepy old paintings of martyred saints, eyes turned up toward the sky, face blank and peaceful even as he shuddered. 

“No,” Sam said, “no sedatives, nobody’s goin’ where I can’t follow.”

“No?” Steve looked up. “I’m not letting go of him.”

Sam glanced over at Yelena, who was still watching Natasha, almost like a bored housecat watching a spider it was deciding whether to ignore or bat at. “You hang onto him all you like,” Sam said, “that’s a good idea.”

Natasha was acting amused by Yelena’s scrutiny, shifting her weight from foot to foot and keeping a wary eye in turn on Bucky. “I disagree,” she said, “I think a sedative is a good idea.”

“You know what I think’s a good idea?” Sam said, edging a little closer to get a better look at Bucky’s eerily blank expression. “I think— Tony— maybe put that wall back up so Bruce can have a little peace.”

“You think?” Tony said. “Bruce?”

Natasha lunged toward Bruce, but Yelena had been expecting it, and brought her down. The two women rolled over, fighting for possession of the Widow’s Bite in Natasha’s hand. Yelena clearly knew the same tricks as Natasha, and while it was stunning to watch, Sam now knew who the problem was. 

So he jumped in, caught a glancing blow to the chin from Natasha’s elbow, grabbed the Widow’s Bite, and gave Natasha a good hit with it as he hauled her off Yelena. 

She shrieked reflexively, convulsed, and went still.

“The great Tony Stark himself was wrong,” Yelena said into the stunned silence. “Zola’s in Romanoff.”

“Good,” the HYDRA chick said, and everyone turned slowly to look at her. She glanced up from her holographic tablet. “Shit. I don’t mean it like _that_ , Jesus.”

“How do we get her out?” Steve asked, loosening his hold on Bucky, but instead of letting go, he changed his grip and pulled Bucky into an embrace. “I’m sorry, Buck, I didn’t—“

“‘Sfine,” Bucky said, sinking down in his arms. 

“I need a fucking drink,” Bruce said, collapsing into a sitting position with his back pressed against the wall. 

“I mean it’s good because now he’s trapped,” the HYDRA chick said. “Romanoff doesn’t have the cybernetic implants Barnes does, so there’s no easy way for Zola to store himself and more importantly, no easy way for him to transfer himself. She must have some, somewhere, enough for him to be there, but now we know to look.”

“Awesome,” Sam said. “I’m with you, Banner. I need a fuckin’ drink.”

 

 

 

Steve was prepared for the cold water this time, and didn’t inhale any. He was prepared for being small again, too, and all the accompanying pain. 

He reflected, as he hauled himself out of the water, how easy it was to forget about hurting all the time when you didn’t anymore. He had to sit a moment on the edge of the pool, collecting enough breath to move.

There was a splash, and he waited, and in a moment Yelena hauled herself up out of the pool next to him, dripping and naked and younger than she was in real life. Younger, but sterner and more dead-eyed, and it made it obvious as she sat next to him squeezing water out of her hair that her cute, smirking, seductive persona was something she’d come up with as an adult. At the moment she was a blank-faced, calculating, efficient creature, honed to a deadly and beautiful edge, and she looked him over without amusement. 

He’d only known her a little while but he knew in the real world she’d’ve laughed to see his transformation. Here, she only looked blank, eyebrows drawing together slightly as she assessed him. 

“This is Steve Rogers without Erskine’s intervention,” Steve said, glad he’d gotten here first so he had enough breath to speak. 

“I see,” she said. “Do you know the way?”

“I think I do,” he said. 

“I watched the last one, the readouts,” she said, pushing gracefully to her feet. “But it is very hard to orient oneself by them.”

Steve got up, glad she wasn’t looking to see how unsteady he was on his feet. He really didn’t miss having to be strategic about standing up from ground level, but at least the skill of wobbling in the right direction came back easily. He’d practiced it enough, surely. 

Hanging on the wall just inside the locker rooms was a pair of ball-chain necklace loops with little tags on them. “These must be the things Tony was talking about,” he said. 

“The emergency exit?” Yelena considered the tags. “How do we know it works?”

“Well,” Steve said. Tony had hastily programmed these in. They were meant to be emergency extraction protocols; if either of their avatars pushed the button, they’d be whisked out of the simulation before the machine could kill them as punishment for failure. “I mean, Tony’s track record is fairly decent.”

Glowing text appeared in midair above them. THEY WORK, it said. 

“He can’t have reacted that fast,” Yelena said, a little warily. 

“I would bet you lunch he had already programmed that in,” Steve said, and he took both necklaces down and passed one to Yelena.

“No bet,” Yelena said, “all of my intel on Stark is about assassinating him, not how his sense of humor works.”

“Most of my intel on Stark is his sense of humor,” Steve admitted, with a little eyeroll. “A snippet for your files: if he ever shuts his mouth, you’re about to die.”

He was glad he’d been here before so he knew what he was doing in the locker room, knew where to find weapons, knew what size boots he wore, knew how to find a good coverall. He was a lot less likely to semi-accidentally fuck Yelena, which was— he sort of couldn’t believe he’d done that, with Natasha, and that he’d remembered it in real life, and he didn’t know if she remembered it, and it was going to really bother him in real life for a good long while, but in here it was easy to compartmentalize. Two pairs of socks this time, the boots had bothered him last time and he’d forgotten that old trick. 

She was ready before he was, but not by enough for it to be embarrassing, and he took a moment to look closer in the first aid locker. Asthma inhalers. He wasn’t thoroughly familiar with modern ones, but curiosity had made him look them up and it stood him in good stead now. He grabbed a couple of rescue inhalers and shoved them into various pockets of his coveralls. He’d come pretty close to a bad time the last time they’d been in here, and he wasn’t excited about repeating that. 

Yelena was standing by the door watching him dispassionately, and he narrowed his eyes at the other offerings in the first aid kit. “We are unlikely to have much time for medical assistance,” she said. 

“Yeah,” he said, “but this body’s fragile, and I found out last time the rules still apply in here. You figure Zola’s had time to suss out how this works? Last time he was starting to be able to alter reality at his whim, so I figure it’s going to get pretty awful pretty quick.”

“He was?” Yelena’s eyes widened slightly for a moment. 

“Oh yeah,” Steve said. “He was changing the relative sizes of things, most notably.”

“Great,” she said on an exhale, almost for a moment betraying a hint of a personality. 

“You figure he’ll be able to do things like, ah, remove all the air in a room, or something?” Steve asked. There was a rack he didn’t recognize, near the door, with an electronic gadget sitting on it, plugged in. It blinked as he watched, and he recognized the logo on top of it as being Tony’s arc reactor. He considered it, then picked up the little gadget, cellphone-sized, and shoved it into his pocket.

“Don’t give him ideas,” Yelena said wearily, and there was something about her inflection that made Steve realize, disconcertingly, that the whole conversation had been in Russian. 

_Be handy if I kept that skill_ , he thought to himself, then squashed it; mostly, when Natasha and Bucky spoke Russian it was because Bucky wanted to, he thought. He’d have to not let on, or would it be kinder to walk away?

No time for distractions. He led Yelena out the door and stood outside with her on the same dim not-quite-New-York streetscape. 

“That’s disorienting,” Yelena said, tilting her head and squinting in a way he recognized. 

“I had vision problems when I formed the memories this simulation’s based on,” Steve said wryly. That astigmatism, that warped everything, was clearly what she was reacting to. “Weird that it doesn’t correct for that, but it doesn’t.”

“More typically,” Yelena said, “it is customary to correct the vision problems with prescription lenses.”

“Oh sweet summer child,” Steve said, “you _are_ young,” mostly to see if she’d betray any personality, but she didn’t react. 

“Well,” she said, “let’s get started, then?”

 

 

“C’mon,” Sam said, putting his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky was curled into himself in the middle of the couch, shuddering intermittently. 

“I should go in there,” Bucky said, his voice hoarse to the point of near-inaudibility.

“No, you shouldn’t,” Sam said. “You should stay the fuck away from anything Zola can reach.”

“I know where to look, though,” Bucky said. 

“You haven’t really slept in like, a week,” Sam said, “you just had major surgery, then minor surgery, you’re down several units of blood, and you had a crazy AI of a man who spent decades torturing you in your head controlling your body for, like, a long time. And then you got electrocuted like fifty times. I figure you’re good out here, man.”

Bucky stared stubbornly off into middle distance. “I spent decades being helpless,” he said. “Don’t yell at me for wanting to fucking do something when I finally get a chance.”

“Oh, Bucky baby,” Sam said, and pulled him into an embrace. “Oh baby. I get it, I do. Come here.”

Bucky abandoned any resistance and let Sam tug him close, resting his head on Sam’s shoulder. “I can’t let him have Natasha,” Bucky said quietly. “Or Steve. It’s killin’ me, Sam.”

“I been on the outside unable to help this whole time,” Sam said. “Let me at least hold you a bit. Let them do their thing, baby, and we’ll be here for ‘em when they get out, and I swear I’ll trust you this time, I’ll know for sure to listen to you.”

“No,” Bucky said, and his hand wound itself loosely through a fold of Sam’s shirt, hanging on. He was shivering, every muscle wound up as tight as it could go. “No, I need you not to trust me. What if he gets in me again? You can’t trust me. I can’t trust me.”

Sam pulled him in tight, wrapping his arms around him, and dropping a kiss on the top of his head. “I know,” he said. “I know, baby. I know what to watch out for. Steve knows what to watch out for. We’re smart people, we’ll pick up on it. You’re gonna be fine.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what that means,” Bucky admitted, after a long moment. 

“You’ll learn,” Sam said. “I promise.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This could be meatier, but there's a lot of things it could be, and I'm posting this in a daze of exhaustion after a 14-hour volunteer work day on a farm and I'm not even telling you what we did ([hint: your food comes from somewhere](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.728694960572697.1073741835.527333477375514&type=3)) and the things I learned about myself-- anyway, fanfiction is escapism, right? 
> 
> I'm also leaving the country for 10 days starting next week so while I hope to get the other half of the chapter up then, I naturally can't promise that. I still have to drive home today-- it's a 6-hour drive from my sister's farm to my actual home-- and haven't started packing for my upcoming overseas visit. (Norway and Iceland, for a family event! I know right? I sound really exciting.)
> 
> But anyway. The rest of the chapter has the heavy burden of being wrap-up and closure, because believe me, Zola is gonna *get* it. And Natasha's gonna give it to him. Sort of. I haven't worked out the details. I promise it'll be awesome. I really do. No more suspense, though. Only mild suspense of how our heroes are gonna pull this off.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not the last chapter after all! But a good juicy meaty one. I promise.  
> It certainly marinated long enough.
> 
> In which Steve is a tiny little shit, Bucky has some memories, and Natasha experiences something she never really realized she always wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SOMEONE MADE FAN ART. LOOK: There's a cover image for the series!!!!  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/4620321  
> Thank you Lori! This is the first fan art I've inspired in this fandom, and I'm super pumped!

 

“I don’t know what I expected,” Steve said out loud as he looked up and saw that about two dozen heavily-armed soldiers had him surrounded. It was true; this wasn’t a particularly excellent hiding place, clearly Zola could see where they were easily, and Yelena had slunk off with a half-assed plan to find Natasha, blithely assuring Steve she’d know whether it was really her. His contribution to the plan had been approximately nothing, since she’d insisted they go into her memories of the Red Room and get out of half-remembered New York, and Steve had no idea where they were and hadn’t been given many clues. 

This mission was a clusterfuck, and the tablet thingy he’d gotten from Stark had the single worst user interface he’d ever encountered. He’d spent most of this time examining it and trying to derive useful information, but all it did was blink esoteric signals in no pattern he understood. He’d shoved it back into his pocket and was keeping a watch, but he couldn’t really see anything and hadn’t brought binoculars.

Also, he was half deaf, so why he’d expected he’d hear someone sneaking up was utterly beyond him. 

“You can expect your death, little friend,” one of the soldiers said, which was more personality than Steve had expected. 

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, putting his hands on his head and turning where the soldier gestured, “I guess I should.”

It just fucking figured that on the forced march his chest started getting tight and his heart started doing its palpitations thing. He breathed through it as best he could, thinking longingly of the inhaler in his thigh pocket, but it wasn’t likely to be very useful. They’d taken his gun and his knife, but they’d ignored the Stark gizmo and the inhaler, and hadn’t even looked at the emergency extractor on its chain around his neck.

They dragged him into a courtyard bordered on three sides by buildings, and by a fence on the fourth side. The courtyard was full of people, soldiers standing in neat ranks. But they weren’t soldiers, not all of them— well, not the normal kind. Not the default ones this program tended to use. About two dozen of them were girls, perhaps teenagers— some young and skinny, some older and closer to adulthood. They were standing in neat ranks like soldiers, but they were wearing uniforms like schoolgirls at gym class. 

It wasn’t hard to pick out the one with bright red hair. Natasha had her hair in two braids and looked about seventeen; her hair was a softer color than he was used to, more ginger and less blood-red, but it was still distinctive. Yelena was standing behind her, similarly attired, though she looked the same age as she had when she’d shown up here with him.

A middle-aged woman with her dark hair scraped severely back into an immaculate bun stared him up and down for a moment as the soldiers paused and saluted. “This is all you could muster?” she asked, and her voice was unfamiliar, but the cadence and accent were Zola’s. 

“I know,” Steve said. “I’m disappointed too.” 

Her hand rose and cracked across his face, and he had prepared himself to stand still for it but he’d forgotten about being so slight; it rocked him sideways and he had to catch himself. He straightened up, shook his head with a wheeze, and said, “C’mon, don’t go easy on me!”

“You are a distraction,” she said, and turned away, which actually was better than Steve had hoped for. He wiped blood from his nose, wheezed again, and gave Natasha a saucy wink. 

Natasha was impassive. Yelena, behind her, looked suddenly weary. Steve couldn’t tell whether Natasha were herself or not. He couldn’t see if Yelena still had her emergency extractor. His knocked against his breastbone as he straightened up. 

The woman was addressing the girls, astonishingly unimaginative stuff about how failure would not be tolerated. Either Zola was yanking their chain, or he just didn’t care enough to be creative. It was pretty clear this was all pulled somewhat-carelessly from Natasha’s memories, layered on top of the simulation Tony had started from Yelena’s. 

Tony had wanted to insert JARVIS in here somewhere, but Steve hadn’t been able to pick up on anything that could’ve been the AI’s influence. Zola, on the other hand, had pretty clearly taken over anything he felt like, making the guards taller and burlier, making the girls smaller and younger, making the walls taller and more severe. The edges felt sharpened, the organic imperfections of a real memory filed off. 

One of the soldiers shifted his weight, standing uncomfortably close to Steve. Steve didn’t give him the satisfaction of shying away, but he braced himself inwardly in case this one got an imagination from somewhere. 

The soldier coughed, which was an odd thing for a computer-generated sprite to do. Steve shot him a sidelong look, did a double take, and then hastily looked at his own feet.

The soldier was Bucky, unmistakable under the low brim of the uniform cap, and he was leaning a little in toward Steve. “Belova thinks that’s really Romanoff,” he murmured, very quietly, and Steve could barely hear him. The other soldiers were murmuring among themselves, again showing more personality than Steve had expected-- had Natasha’s memory included an unusual amount of animation in the ‘extra’ characters like this, or was Zola working on something, or was this JARVIS’s contribution?

“Try my good ear,” Steve whispered back testily, then froze. Bucky would have known. That wasn’t Bucky. And Bucky wasn’t supposed to be here anyway. 

“You never told me which ear was the good one,” Bucky said, and Steve kept staring straight ahead. That was-- so it wasn’t Bucky, but why would Zola be messing with him like this? Not-Bucky shifted his weight, pulling away, and in a moment he leaned in on Steve’s other side. “Zola’s using Romanoff as an avatar,” he murmured. 

“I figure Zola’s in everything in here,” Steve answered, and turned slightly to look at not-Bucky. It was absolutely Bucky’s face, down to the unusually somber expression; he looked like himself circa 1944 contemplating a difficult mission. Or… well, slightly older, but— not at all like he did now, either. 

“Not me,” Bucky said. 

“Barnes isn’t in here,” Steve said. 

“Didn’t say I was Barnes either,” not-Bucky said, but just then the woman turned around and marched back toward him. Not-Bucky melted back into the other soldiers and Steve couldn’t track him, so he turned to look at the woman and tried not to feel like he was turning his back on an enemy. But it stung, to think of Zola using Bucky even now.  

 

“We will have to make him an example,” the woman said eventually, after a great deal of wasted time, and pointed imperiously at him, then turned her hand to curl her finger, beckoning him. 

“Uh,” Steve said. No point pretending to be smooth. “I think maybe I wouldn’t be a very good example.” One of the soldiers shoved him from behind, and he took advantage of his stumble to look back into the crowd of soldiers. 

There was no sign of Bucky; they all had anonymous, sameish faces. 

Hands closed around his arms and Steve let them drag him off, wondering how Bucky— well, Not-Bucky—had disappeared so quickly. Was Zola playing with him? He couldn’t see the game, yet, couldn’t see what Zola would hope to accomplish by using Bucky. Surely Zola could just crush them both, unless it was that he couldn’t tell Yelena was an outsider yet. It seemed pretty obvious to Steve; she stuck out like a sore thumb, too old and too real. 

Zola must be aware of whatever JARVIS was up to, and must recognize that Tony had put some encoding in. Was it that he was looking to disable the emergency extractors? He had to know killing them without disabling the extractors first wouldn’t really work, it would only buy him more time and restart the simulation. 

The girls, without any apparent direction, formed a square around him, and Natasha stepped forward, stone-faced. Steve grimaced; if fake-Bucky was right, this was Zola, hoping to draw Yelena out probably. If— hell, there was no point going through scenarios. He was just going to have to see what happened. The best possible outcome was probably a glitch, where they’d be able to find Natasha— probably. Steve wondered if he could cause one. 

“You know what to do, Natalia,” the woman said, and Steve barely managed to get his hands up to protect his face as Natalia attacked with fists and feet.

It didn’t take Steve long to figure out that all his hand-to-hand training in the bigger body didn’t translate particularly well, but the things Peggy had taught him— those were pretty adaptable. He was about the same size as Natalia, but a lot slower and weaker, so she landed some pretty good hits and his lungs started to seize up. 

Still, he managed to survive for a couple of minutes. Either Natasha was pulling her punches, or not-Bucky was right and this wasn’t really Natasha at all. Just as he had the thought, though, she landed a good one that broke his nose and knocked him ass over teakettle across the open square of ground. 

He rolled over, missed his footing, and scrabbled to his knees unsteadily, trying to breathe through the blood and listening to his breath whistling in his chest. Through his blurred eyes he caught Natalia’s not-at-all-Natasha expression,  drawn up in smug pleasure, and certainty crystallized in Steve’s gut: that wasn’t her. That was Zola. 

He wiped his nose and braced his other hand to push himself to his feet, and there was something hard under his hand, something his fingers closed around. A knife handle— a knife very like one of the ones Bucky habitually carried. Not-Natasha was approaching with a slow, deliberate, menacing stride, fingers flexing, mouth curled. 

Steve gathered himself, watching her approach, letting her think he was too weak to stand up. The knife was either from not-Bucky or from JARVIS in some other way, he suspected— not-Bucky might have been JARVIS, come to think of it, having observed enough to cloak himself in a form for ease of communication. You’d think he’d have used the voice Steve was used to hearing from him, though, to make it more obvious. 

He realized as Natasha came closer that he actually _couldn’t_ stand up; he was really light-headed and he wasn’t having much luck catching his breath. Well. He could probably still finish this. He should punch the extractor button, but that’d just dump him out of the scenario and wouldn’t stop it, so Yelena would be left here with not-Bucky and not-Natasha and he wasn’t sure she’d know who was who. 

“This was less satisfying than I had anticipated,” Natalia said, very clearly not in her own accent, and Steve waited for her to reach out to grab him by the head. 

When she had him, he stood up as best he could, and rammed the knife up under her breastbone. She staggered back, losing her grip on his short hair, and stared at him in shock. Blood burst from her nose and mouth, and someone— Yelena— shrieked. 

Everything went black and Steve fell over. 

 

 

“You’re still here,” Stark said, glancing over. “Nice outfit.”

“I gotta see this through,” Lakeisha said. “And I carefully weighed the benefits of staying in my bloody shirt versus wearing this stunning piece of Stark Industries haute couture, and not having blood all over me won out.” It was a Stark Industries Charity Softball Tournament 2013 t-shirt, a men’s one so it was tight around the boobs and way too loose around the waist and way too long and too tight around the ass, but it was decent and covered her and she was willing to just deal with it. 

“I feel like we could do better,” Stark said, but he was already absorbed in the holographic diagram again. 

“I assume you’re looking for cybernetic implants in Romanoff’s body,” Lakeisha said. 

“Yes,” Stark said, “it seemed wise to double-check. She doesn’t have anything like Barnes does.”

“Well,” Lakeisha said, “he’s sort of… obvious. Everything about him. She’s supposed to pass as normal, in everything. So it stands to reason it’d be something small, like nano-small, or well-concealed, maybe distributed, or—“

“Oh,” Stark said, “hm,” and Lakeisha figured it was a cue to shut up. 

She wandered over to the couch instead, where Sam had wrapped Bucky in a blanket. There was an IV stand, with a half-empty bag of blood on it, going into a vein in Bucky’s arm, and Bucky was basically passed-out in Sam’s lap. 

“How you holdin’ up?” Sam asked. 

Lakeisha shrugged. “I’m glad they’re putting some of his blood back in,” she said, sitting down in the armchair. 

“Took a while to get him to agree to take it,” Sam said. “He wants to be in there helping, but I just— I can’t watch any more of that, you know?”

“I think he’s done enough for now,” Lakeisha said. “If Stark can find the implants in Romanoff, he can actually manually remove Zola the easy way, can’t he?”

“I imagine so,” Sam said. “What, you think they’re made of something that doesn’t show up on scans, or what?”

“Either that or they’re nanotechnology or something,” Lakeisha said. She sighed. “I only know enough about that to write press releases.”

“Nanotechnology,” Sam said. “Wait, is that real yet?”

“Yeah,” she said, “though it’s not sci-fi level yet. Not, like, replicators or whatever.”

“Replicators,” Sam said. 

“You know,” she said. “The gray goo theory and all.”

“Gray goo,” Sam said. 

Lakeisha pondered it for a moment, how to explain it. “I was a real nerd as a kid,” she said, “and I was super into conspiracy and doomsday theories, and the gray goo one was that they were gonna make self-replicating nanobots that were gonna consume all matter on Earth and turn everything to gray goo.”

“Think I heard of that one,” Sam said. 

“You probably did,” she said, “it was in the news for a bit. But not, I might add, because it was actually gonna happen. It’s not.”

“Good,” Sam said. “One less thing to worry about.”

Lakeisha pulled out her phone and thumbed through it. Pepper had given an interview, so the rampant speculation had died down, and various other people had stepped in to handle the fallout, since this was technically SI-related enough that their PR department had arguable jurisdiction. Which was nice, for once. It meant her phone had calmed down, though it was still running on a pretty minimal interface after having been wiped when JARVIS temporarily nuked himself. 

“Aha,” Stark exclaimed dramatically enough that he startled Bucky awake, and Bucky jerked upright and Sam had to kind of flail to keep his balance and keep the IV stand from getting yanked over. 

“Results?” Lakeisha asked. 

“Maybe,” Stark said. 

Bucky blinked blearily at her, then frowned at the needle in his arm. Before Sam could say anything, Bucky jerked his arm and yanked the needle out, spurting blood all over himself, shoved to his feet, kinked the tube and hooked it up onto the IV stand, and bent his arm sharply to stop the bleeding. He padded off barefoot to stand next to Natasha’s gurney. 

“Find him?” he asked. 

“I think so,” Stark said. “Lakeisha was onto something. It’s sort of nanotechnology, and sort of…” He trailed off. Lakeisha got to her feet and followed Barnes over, handing him a tissue. He looked at it blankly, and she took his forearm in one hand, unbent his arm, and wedged the tissue into the crook of his elbow to stop the bleeding from the needle stick. 

“Thanks,” Barnes said. 

“Don’t mention it,” she said absently, staring at the holographic display. “Is that— does she have circuitry embedded in— is that a bone?”

“Ribs,” Tony said. “Three of her ribs.”

“That’s…” Lakeisha made a face. Bucky’s expression was horrible, like he’d been carved from stone. 

“We’d probably better get Asiyah in on this,” Tony said. 

“And you’d probably better get back to watching the simulation,” Wells said. “I think— I hope I’m reading this wrong but it looks to me like Rogers just murdered Romanoff.”

Everyone in the room turned their eyes slowly toward Natasha’s vital signs monitor in silent horror, and waited.

 

It was only after a moment of everything being black that there was a distinctive click of a flashlight, and Yelena said, “You fucking maniac, what the fuck did you do!”

Steve stared up at her. The blood was gone from his nose and mouth, but he still couldn’t breathe. “That wasn’t Natasha,” he wheezed, making no attempt to sit up— sitting up would only compress his diaphragm. It might open his chest cavity up a little, but it was the airways that were the problem, and letting his diaphragm work unhindered was likely to do just as much good in his current state. 

“Yes it was!” Yelena said. “You killed her! We came in here to save her! I might have saved myself the effort!”

“You think it was her,” Steve said, “you go find me the body. Should be right here, if it was really her.” He waved a hand.

Yelena hesitated, frowning. “What is that noise you are making?”

“Asthma,” Steve answered, too air-deprived to be witty. He waved his hand again. “I’m waiting. Body. Right here.”

Yelena stood a moment at the edge of his vision, shining the beam of her flashlight around. “There is no body,” she admitted grudgingly. “But you are a reckless idiot!”

“She’d’ve killed me in a second,” Steve said, “and that was Zola anyway.”

“You have the extractor button!” Yelena said.

“Then I’m out there, and I can’t help,” he said.

“Better than killing the person we are here to save!” Yelena said. She was a bit blustery, in a way Natasha never was, and Steve was too sore and breathless to find it cute. It probably was. Bucky would probably think it was, at least, and that was as close to normal as Steve had ever come. Using Bucky as a human barometer was a bit dicier now, but still oddly effective. 

Right, Bucky. “You notice Bucky in there?” Steve asked. “He say anything to you?”

“Barnes is not in this simulation,” Yelena said, stopping to loom over him with her arms crossed. Steve let his breath whistle, making no effort to suppress the noise, and thought it over for a moment. 

“One of the soldiers had his face,” he said. “Spoke to me. It was weird.”

“That has to be Zola,” Yelena said. 

“Naw,” Steve said, “I think it was JARVIS. I think that’s who gave me the knife. I didn’t see, it was on the ground and I fell pretty much on it, but I think JARVIS is using Bucky’s face as a way to blend in.”

“You’d think he’d use someone Zola wouldn’t know,” Yelena said. 

Steve considered that. “Fair point,” he said. “Maybe he figured Zola wouldn’t see?”

“I don’t know enough how this looks like to a computer,” Yelena said. “Perhaps it does not matter?”

“There’s just an awful lot we don’t know,” Steve mused. 

“I have read reports of you,” Yelena said, “do not fuss at me about being ill-informed for a mission. You never have a plan.”

“I always have a plan,” Steve countered. 

“Whoever said you are not a liar was, themselves, a filthy liar,” Yelena said. 

“I knew I liked you,” Steve said, and shoved himself up onto an elbow. “Christ. If that had really been Natasha there’d be no way I’d still be alive.”

“You had more skills than I had expected,” Yelena admitted. 

“Not really,” Steve said. “It wasn’t Natasha.” His injuries were fading, though. Maybe they’d come back when the glitch was over. The asthma wasn’t fading. Oh, he had an inhaler. He shoved himself up and retrieved the inhaler from his thigh pocket, shook it, and took a dose. While he was doing so, he remembered the Stark gizmo in his other pocket, so he pulled it out and looked at it. 

“So it was Zola, pretending to be Natasha,” Yelena said, coming and sitting next to him. 

“Right,” Steve said when he had to let out the exhale. He shook the inhaler again, absently. He’d never taken one before, and had it be useful. It was— he could feel it loosening his chest already. He breathed a few times, then took another hit from it. 

“What is this thing?” Yelena asked, looking at the gizmo. It was an assortment of blinking lights, and it kind of looked like one of Tony’s holographic interfaces only compressed down. Which was peachy, as Steve had trouble reading those fucking things at the best of times. With the color-blindness, he had no chance.

Steve exhaled, grimacing at how bitter the medicine tasted. He hunted around until he found the canteen he’d clipped to the back of his belt, and rinsed his mouth and spat off to the side where Yelena wasn’t. “You probably got a better shot at figuring it out than me,” he said. “Anyway I figured if there was a glitch we’d find Natasha in it, but I don’t see her now.”

“She’s probably too far off for us to hear her,” Yelena said. “That’s happened to me before. If the other real person in your simulation isn’t in the same room as you, or equivalent distance, you can’t find each other in a glitch. It gets very boring.”

“Great,” Steve muttered. “That was my only idea.”

“You were hoping for a glitch?” Yelena asked. 

“Weren’t you?” Steve looked up. 

“No,” she said, “because from what I read of the last one, Zola used glitches to reset the simulation to his liking. When we come out of this we will be at gunpoint and he will take us to where he wants us. Before this he wasn’t sure if I was real or a JARVIS-generated sprite. Now he knows I am real and can kill me to get to you.”

“Ah,” Steve said. He pondered that. “Can we do anything unexpected when the glitch ends? Like, can we be somewhere he doesn’t expect, or can we set anything up to surprise him?”

“No,” Yelena said, “we can’t.” She crouched down to better see the gizmo’s screen. “Unless this thing can, but I don’t see how.”

“Well,” Steve said, “if Zola can do it, JARVIS can do it, right? Only Zola’s a recorded personality who’s a computer now, and JARVIS is a synthetic personality who’s a computer now, so really he should be better at it, right? Being a native and all.”

“Hm,” Yelena said. “JARVIS is the thing in Tony’s computers?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. He glanced over at her. “I uh. I’ve learned a lot, but, um, y’know, when I was born, refrigerators were about the height of technology, so…”

“Romanoff is the hacker, not me,” Yelena said. 

“JARVIS,” Steve said forlornly, “I feel like you should be around, here.” He waited, but there was no answer. He sighed. “So much for that.”

Yelena leaned her head in her hand, her knees pulled up to support it, looking very small and young. “I am not going to fuck you to pass the time,” she said. 

“Did you and Natasha really used to—“

“Yes,” she said, “and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“She defected and you didn’t,” Steve said. “Was that—“

“She made me believe she had betrayed me,” Yelena said, looking away, “and our masters exacted punishments upon me for her treachery, so I suffered greatly for her rebellion, and it took me years to understand that she would have taken me with her if she could have.”

“So… but you’re reconciled now,” Steve concluded. 

Yelena looked at him, looked him over, looked away. “Maybe,” she said. She fiddled with her shoelace; she was still dressed in the ridiculous schoolgirl gym costume. “I asked her if she’d slept with you and she said no, but she wanted to,” she went on in a moment. “Said she’d gone to great lengths to get you a different girlfriend or boyfriend so she could remove the temptation.” 

“Really,” he said, completely blank. He’d always figured her matchmaking was to keep him from asking her out, but he hadn’t ever thought it’d be something she’d go the other way with.

“But you did last time you were in here, didn’t you,” Yelena said, amused. “You totally did.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, and blushed. 

Yelena watched him; he looked away, and when he looked back she was grinning, still watching him. “You need to get a little better at keeping your reactions under wraps,” she said. “I am a spy, you know, and so is Natasha. If I had any desire for control over you I could use those reactions. I could be filling your head with nonsense even now.”

“You’re not, though,” Steve said, and poked at the incomprehensible gizmo. “So it’s not a big deal.”

Yelena scowled at him. “But I could,” she said. “Have you no defense against such things?”

“Stubbornness,” Steve said. “I always believe the best of people because I know fine well how bad it can get and I choose to believe it won’t.” 

He poked at the gizmo, and it made a strange whirring noise, and suddenly an arrow came up on the screen, pointing approximately leftward, and the caption RUN THIS DIRECTION came up.

“Well,” Steve said, “that’s unambiguous.” He swiped at his noise, which had stopped bleeding, and shoved to his feet. 

“Run this direction,” Yelena said. “But it’s a glitch, there’s nothing there.”

It blinked RUN THIS DIRECTION again, then said, NOW I MEAN NOW, and Steve said, “Tony,” and started jogging the direction the arrow was pointing. It was disorienting, because there was nothing there. 

Yelena caught up to him immediately. “This is futile,” she said. 

“The glitch has gotta be ending,” Steve said. “If JARVIS can see what Zola’s setting up for after the glitch, this must be his way of counteracting it. Maybe what we’re doing now actually affects where we’ll be when the simulation starts back up.”

“I can’t imagine how,” Yelena said. “What we do here has literally no bearing on what happens in there, regardless.” But she was jogging to keep up with him, and seemed a lot less uncomfortable with running in total featureless darkness into nothing. 

Steve’s chest started to get tight; they’d been jogging for like three or four minutes by now, and nothing had happened, and he was watching the screen as best he could but it just had the arrow up on it. The arrow veered a little, and he changed direction to follow it. Not that it was possible to really tell what direction one was really heading. It was impossible to run full-out in the dark, the body just wouldn’t allow it. Steve’s wouldn’t, anyway. Yelena was visibly reining herself in to keep pace with him. 

The arrow suddenly swung wildly, and Steve had to grab Yelena’s arm to keep her on course. They wound up going back the way they had come, with FASTER blinking on the screen. 

“This is stupid,” Yelena said, but just then the lights started flickering back on, and Steve ran full-tilt into someone. 

“Whoooof,” all of the air came out of him, and a man’s arms caught him and swung with him as they fell, so that Steve landed on top and rolled off undamaged. Yelena skidded to a halt on the— grass, they were on grass— beside them, it was outdoors, gray light. 

Steve landed on the grass at last, breath knocked out and wheezing to suck it back in. “Belova,” the man he’d hit said, scrambling to sit up. “It worked!”

Bucky. Or, Not-Bucky. He was dressed like the soldiers from the first scenario, hat knocked off, hair short. He held his hand out. “Soldat,” Yelena said, then reined in her astonishment and looked angry. “You’re not real,” she said. 

“No,” he said, “I’m Romanoff.”

“Bullshit,” Yelena said, producing a pistol from behind her back— must’ve had a hidden holster, Steve realized. 

Not-Bucky had gotten as far as his knees, and was sitting back on his heels, knees splayed out, hands up, palms forward. “You know,” Not-Bucky said carefully, and it was his voice, but Steve realized he was speaking Russian, and he wouldn’t know Bucky’s accent in Russian from anyone else’s. “I hate to travel without an umbrella.”

“You stole that from her,” Yelena said, pistol unwavering. “You’re in her mind, you know everything she knows.”

“He had less than half an hour in my mind,” Not-Bucky said crossly, “you know it takes longer to crack me than that. You’ve done it yourself, Yelena.”

“Natasha wouldn’t know which of my ears was the bad one,” Steve said out loud, as it occurred to him. “Zola would, he had my file memorized.” Yelena glanced at him, and he said, “This guy got it wrong when he first showed up. Whispered in my bad ear. Wasted time.”

“It’s not in the current version of your file,” Not-Bucky said. “I think Carter purged a lot of your old file.” He held out his hand. “Rogers, gimme the Stark gizmo.”

Steve looked at it. It had gone blank. He might have broken it, running full tilt into Not-Bucky like that. “I don’t know if it works,” he said. 

“It works,” Not-Bucky said. “It’s a connection to JARVIS, and I can use it to lock Zola out of my real body.”

“Bucky’s body, or Natasha’s body?” Steve asked, hesitating. 

“Natasha’s,” Not-Bucky said. “Steve. It’s me. I’m Natasha. I couldn’t use my own appearance in here because Zola’s got it. Bucky’s body is safe, currently, it’s just that his likeness is stored in here and it was easy for me to get to it.”

“Don’t,” Yelena said suddenly, as Steve made to hand the gizmo over. “I still don’t— I’m not convinced.”

“We don’t have much time,” Not-Bucky said. It was hard to tell, Steve thought, watching him, whether the body language was Virtual Winter Soldier or Natasha. It was much trickier than he’d thought to adjust to the appearance being so WWII-era Bucky. It would be easier if he were standing and walking. On his knees, there wasn’t enough motion to draw a definitive conclusion. 

The gizmo lit up. They all looked at it, and letters crawled across the display: Y-E-S. 

“Yes what,” Steve said, frustrated. 

G-I-V-E T-O R-O-M-A-N-O-F-F. 

Steve handed the thing to Not-Bucky. It was good enough for him. Yelena made a frustrated noise, and lowered her gun. “I’ll take that under advisement,” Steve said, and dusted himself off, climbed to his feet, and took another hit from his inhaler. 

“We don’t have long,” Not-Bucky said, swiping his finger across the gizmo’s screen, conjuring a virtual keyboard, and keying something rapid into it. He finished by sticking his thumb down in the center of the screen and holding it until everything disappeared. 

“If nothing is real,” Steve said, “why does that thing matter?”

“Because it’s all real,” Not-Bucky said, “to an extent. There’s logic that governs it. It’s just not quite the same as the logic that governs the real world.”

“Can you change the logic?” Steve asked. 

“I never could before,” Not-Bucky said, “but Stark changed the rules with this thing. Well, more properly, Zola changed the rules. Stark’s just keeping up.” He shoved the gizmo into his pocket. “So I managed to get you to come out on the other side of a boundary but Zola’s busy trying to move that boundary and keep up, so we’d better get moving.”

Steve looked at Yelena, who was regarding Not-Bucky with deep suspicion. “I don’t see much choice,” Steve said. 

Yelena breathed in, breathed out, and fixed them both with a bright smile. “Let’s get to it, then,” she said, reholstering her pistol.

 

 

“Let me in there,” Bucky growled, knowing they weren’t going to do anything of the sort. It was gnawing at him, though, and he couldn’t sit still, couldn’t calm himself, couldn’t think of anything but what Zola would be doing inside Natasha’s head. 

“No can do, Popsicle Pal,” Tony said absently, frowning at his holographic display. Bucky could see the readouts, backwards, and could follow enough to know that he was tracking the sprite that represented Steve in the virtual environment. “Looks like Rogers didn’t murder Romanoff, though. He’s, it’s all whited out with a glitch and he’s still running around like a crazed rabbit.”

“JARVIS is doing something,” Bucky observed, and when Tony looked at him blankly, he pointed at the scrolling line of code in the command window to the left— well, right, from Tony’s side. JARVIS had his own font color, distinct from the others, and there was something wildly active going on in that window. 

“So he is,” Tony said, squinting at the window. He shot Bucky a look. “You can read that?”

“No,” Bucky said, “I don’t understand the code, but I know how it works. His window is scrolling like that, he’s up to something.”

Tony gestured and pulled another window over next to JARVIS’s. “Well,” he said, “this is Zola’s window.” It was scrolling at roughly the same pace. 

“So he’s up to somethin’ too,” Bucky said. 

“Looks like they’re in a sort of race,” Tony said. “Working on much the same things. JARVIS is trying to change the environment, and Zola’s trying to prevent him, looks like. JARVIS is… I don’t understand the choices he’s making, but it takes so much of his processing power to do this that I don’t wanna bug him for explanations either.”

“Could Zola interfere with him?” Bucky asked. “Make him do the wrong things?”

“No,” Tony said, “whatever it is, it’s not that.”

Bucky had been quietly looking through the logs from their last trip into the virtual reality environment while Tony had bustled around with the news about Natasha’s cybernetic implants. He should have known those were there, should have guessed— but there was no point fussing, there was really no ‘should’ in this situation. So he had some idea what the logs looked like, though he’d had to read the transcriptions mostly, where Yelena had translated the code into more descriptive English. He’d figured out his own signature in the logs, though, what he looked like when he moved, what he looked like when someone else animated him. 

So he recognized the signature in the sixth terminal window. It wasn’t one of the computer-generated sprites; there was certainly an intelligence moving it individually. “That’s me,” he said, pointing to it. Number one was JARVIS, the way Tony had it organized, and now two was Zola; three was Yelena Belova, who he recognized and was disconcerted by— he’d certainly injured her when she was a child, and it nagged at him, a sickening little hook like a broken piece of food behind a tooth in the back of his mouth— and four was Steve, beloved Steve, skinny and fierce and so long-lost in depths of memory that all kinds of unexpected things were stirring in Bucky’s deepest mind-places. And five, five was Natasha, and Bucky didn’t have time to look at her, couldn’t stand to see how Zola was using her— because Zola was certainly using her. 

“What,” Tony said absently, distracted, but after a moment snapped his attention to Bucky’s face, followed his pointing finger. 

“This is me,” he said. He glanced over at Tony, then back. “Someone’s using me, in there.”

“What do you mean,” Tony demanded, intense and overbearing. Bucky appreciated the intensity even as parts of him recoiled from it. 

“I mean someone’s using my— my presence, my in-there self, all my stats and characteristics and appearance— it looked like this in the logs when Zola was being me, but not quite,” Bucky said. 

Tony scanned the terminal window for a moment, and said, “Wouldja lookit that.”

“What’s that mean,” Sam asked, appearing suddenly next to Bucky in the way he had of being within your personal space without being unnerving. Bucky was deeply grateful for it; he needed that, and it was an extravagant luxury to be able to demand it of someone who wasn’t Steve. 

Hell, even having Steve was luxury beyond imagining. He shouldn’t get cocky about it. Steve could die in there. 

“It means someone’s using Barnes’s virtual self as an avatar,” Tony said. He scanned all the logs quickly, looking for patterns— Bucky had begun to pick up on the trick of finding patterns where the code rippled in certain ways, physically visible as clusters of lines in different lengths indicating moments where sprites interacted with one another— it was so much faster than realtime it was impossible to understand what was going on in any meaningful way, but if you looked for the patterns you could at least see really important stuff, if totally divorced from context. 

“I picked up on that,” the HYDRA tech said. Bucky was sort of pleased and sort of suspicious that she’d apparently become an expert on him in the months since he’d duct-taped her mouth shut and made her do maintenance work at gunpoint. “It’s Barnes’s avatar, but I don’t think it’s Zola’s— er, mind. It’s someone else.”

“JARVIS,” Bucky guessed. 

“No,” Wells answered. “I really don’t think so. It reads a lot more organic than that.”

“So whose scenario got reloaded?” Lakeisha asked. “That was what the question was, right? JARVIS and Zola were fighting over whose scenario would get loaded.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, “I don’t know, is the thing. This is frustrating as fuck, okay?”

Bucky swayed a little where he stood, and Sam’s arm pressed against his, steadying him before the arm slipped around his back and Sam stepped in to brace with his hip. “You wanna chair or somethin’?” Sam asked. 

“No,” Bucky said, but leaned on him. He was staring fixedly at the patterns, as was Tony; he could see them just as well backward through the holographic display as forwards. “Whoever’s using my— me— is interacting with Steve. Put their windows together, you can see it— they’re speaking or interacting or— whatever— opposite one another.”

“Wait,” Tony said, “check this,” and dragged the Bucky window next to the Steve window, then both next to the JARVIS window. “Bucky’s interacting with JARVIS. It’s that device I put in the locker room, I know it is— it’s working!”

“You put something in there so they can interact with JARVIS,” Bucky said. 

“Yeah,” Tony said. “It’s only fair, Zola can interact with any of them. The device doesn’t let them control JARVIS, but it lets them communicate directly in real-time. Steve was sort of using it, but I think he doesn’t understand it.” He watched the terminal window scroll— the Bucky one. “Whoever’s Bucky, he does understand.”

“If Zola’s Bucky that’s a problem,” Wells said. 

“Not really,” Tony said, “I think JARVIS can isolate him from the, you know, organic minds.” He gestured at the Zola window, then at the Steve window. “I mean, even I can— the code looks different when there’s a machine involved. Organic minds give you more random misfires and generally slower reaction times, but better innovation when something unexpected happens. Machine minds generally have better-looking, crisp-edged code unless something they haven’t anticipated happens, when they spew out something like— oh, like that, that unholy mess.” Something very long unspooled on Jarvis’s screen, like a reboot screen on an older machine, many rapid lines of short code getting longer, and then it was back to normal. 

“So whoever’s in Bucky is human,” Bucky said, watching what looked like the equivalent of a flustered outburst scroll through the code. 

“And whoever’s in Natasha is a machine,” Tony said, gesturing. 

“So Natasha’s using me as an avatar,” Bucky said. He was a little startled to discover that it pleased him deeply. 

“That does seem to be the upshot of this, yes,” Tony said. 

 

 

“I don’t know how you get anything done with this giant thing wobbling around between your legs,” Not-Bucky grumbled, adjusting himself in his pants as they walked. Steve and Yelena both stared at him for a shocked moment before Steve dissolved into laughter. 

“You get used to it,” Steve assured him. 

“Fucking hell,” Not-Bucky said. “It’s so goddamn delicate and unstable. It just, like, wiggles around! I have no patience for this. It’s so distracting.”

“You would think being nearly two meters tall would be the thing you’d get hung up on,” Yelena pointed out. “And is it really that giant?”

“No,” Not-Bucky said, “I think about being tall all the time. I have never really considered having a dick before. I don’t know that it’s giant relative to others, I just know it’s giant relative to what I’m used to, which is internal goddamn gonads.”

Yelena stared at him, raised an eyebrow, and then pulled up her shirt to expose her breasts. “How about now?” she said. 

Steve blinked in shock— small, perky, pale skin and pink nipples—  then hastily looked away, blushing furiously. Not-Bucky stared fixedly at her breasts for a moment, and then said, “Holy fucking— _shit_ —“ 

“Not so wobbly now,” Yelena said sweetly, pulling her shirt back down. 

“No,” Not-Bucky groused, “not so wobbly. Holy shit, how is it that men run the world?” He adjusted himself again in his pants. “This is awful, Steve, I don’t know how you do it.”

“Like I said,” Steve said, still blushing, “you get used to it. How much farther do we need to go?” He really didn’t need to talk about dicks with this crew, it wasn’t something that needed exploration. 

“I’m looking for a port I can connect to,” Not-Bucky said. He pulled the gizmo out of his coat pocket and effortlessly pulled up a grid, with a blinking square. “We’re here, it’s there, should be…” He pointed. “Past that poorly-imagined hedgerow.”

“And will we be expected to go there?” Steve asked. “I mean, will Zola be waiting?”

“I don’t think so,” Not-Bucky said. “It’s not an obvious, like plug, or anything. It’s the boundary of a grid point, and by JARVIS’s map there’s wiggle room, which means I can create something like this in there. Or, well, JARVIS can.” 

“Has he?” Steve asked. 

“No,” Not-Bucky said, “we’re trying not to attract Zola’s attention. All the running around this device was making you do before was to try to get you squeezed between grid points as well, so you wouldn’t fall right into the scenario Zola was constructing.”

“How can you see that kind of thing?” Steve asked. 

Not-Bucky didn’t answer for a moment, walking with his head down. “I had to share head-space with Zola for a little bit,” he said finally. “He could see that stuff. It made me… aware of it.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “I should have seen sooner—“

“No,” Not-Bucky said, “Steve, it wasn’t your fault. Anyway I’m talking about when I got in here. Before I figured out that I could just go take another body, and went looking for Bucky.”

“How is it that Zola can’t just— know where we are?” Yelena asked. “Surely— and JARVIS too, can’t they just see the same map we were looking at from outside?”

“The map you look at from outside is a lot more approximate than it looks,” Not-Bucky said. “The grids aren’t really grids, they’re— it’s all kind of nebulous, and only as real as consensus can make them. So, since JARVIS is working in opposition to Zola, a lot of their efforts are just canceling each other out.” 

“I see it,” Steve interrupted suddenly, looking at the line that went across the edge of his vision. “The end of the grid. I’m not supposed to notice, is that how it works?”

Not-Bucky tilted his head. “Yeah,” he said, “you’re supposed to just dismiss it. But that’s the edge of the grid, and it starts up again over there, and the tree in the middle is a landmark so it’s there twice. It’s not supposed to be two trees, and if you look from most angles it’s not, but from here—“ He broke into a jog and deftly climbed the— middle— absence of tree, between what was more or less two halves of a big old oak tree. 

“So if we can connect directly to JARVIS, we can help him get an edge over Zola, and trap Zola,” Not-Bucky concluded, bracing one booted foot on each side of the gap left in the tree. “I might add, right now it is pretty awesome to be six feet tall. I always suspected being tall would be great, and it is, and that’s terribly annoying.”

“No, it is objectively awesome to be tall,” Steve said. “Except on long plane rides and in the back seats of cars. Oh, and hotel beds.”

“I’m gonna miss Little Steve,” Not-Bucky said. “I kind of like the pocket-size version. Before this is over can I make out with you in this body?”

“I feel like that might be inappropriate,” Steve said. 

“C’mon,” Not-Bucky said, and he was carving intently with a knife at what looked like nothing. Steve had to blink and look away, it was so disorienting. “You know Bucky wouldn’t mind.”

“He would be _so_ annoyed,” Steve said. “Are you kidding?” Well, old-Bucky would’ve been. He didn’t know about the current incarnation, beat up and beat down as he was, and didn’t want to think about it.

Yelena climbed nimbly up the tree as well, leaving Steve on the ground eyeing it dubiously. It was neither one nor two trees, it clearly wasn’t real all the way through, and also, he sucked at climbing trees and had gotten himself in terrible trouble more than once as a kid messing with them. 

“He’d never know,” Not-Bucky said. “C’mon. You know nothing in here counts anyway.”

“I remembered what happened last time when I got out,” Steve said. 

Not-Bucky paused and looked over at him, blank-faced. “Really?”

“Yes,” Steve said. “All the details. Everything.”

“Oh dear,” Not-Bucky said. “Or— I mean, I’m kind of glad, because it was hot, but— that is awkward. I wouldn’t have lied to you about it, it usually doesn’t carry over at all.”

“So what do we do if Zola finds us here?” Yelena asked casually, but there was something in the line of her shoulders that made Steve think perhaps it wasn’t rhetorical.

Not-Bucky glanced up at Yelena, then followed the direction of her gaze. “Well, shit,” he said, then bent his head and got back to work. He pulled a cord out of the gizmo— Steve had not seen that it had one, where had that come from?— and plugged it into whatever he’d carved between the intersections in the not-tree. “So much for making out with Steve later.”

“What can we do?” Steve asked, wishing he could see what it was they were looking at. 

“I don’t think he’s found us, quite,” Not-Bucky said, “but he’s looking in the right spot.” Holograms sprung up around him, which must be from the device; he sorted through them easily, and opened a window and started something scrolling in it. Steve wasn’t close enough to read anything, but it wouldn’t have mattered, he was sure.

“It looks like what we see from outside,” Yelena said wonderingly. “Only— a lot slower.”

“Well,” Not-Bucky said. “Time’s sped up, in here. So the world’s fastest computers are annoyingly slow, from this perspective.”

“How come our brains work at normal speed?” Steve asked. 

“Human brains are pretty flexible,” Not-Bucky said. “So actually it gives us squishy types an advantage over the machines, because for them this is really fast and they’ve got to be firing on all cylinders to make it work, but we can kind of flail around and get shit done regardless— aha. Here we go.”

The holograms expanded, and Steve jumped back slightly as they came down and around the tree like a cage, with him barely on the right side of it. But as he watched, they expanded outward, at first quickly, then slower, until it was a barely noticeable shimmering crawl. 

“Will that keep them off?” Yelena asked. 

“No,” Not-Bucky said, then amended, “well, it might keep them busy. I’m not trying to protect us so much as I am trying to destroy Zola.” 

“We have these things,” Steve said, pulling out the emergency extractor device, still around his neck. 

Not-Bucky glanced at him, then consulted a holographic screen he gestured into existence. “Oh,” he said. “That’s handy. Maybe you should just use those and get outta here before Zola does something awful.”

“I’m not leaving you here,” Steve said.

“You’re not really helping me here either,” Not-Bucky said absently, absorbed in his holograms. 

“Ooh,” Yelena said, leaning in and poking another section of the hologram. “Here. Try that.”

“Good catch,” Not-Bucky said.

Steve resigned himself to the disorientation, and scrambled up the tree to get closer to the other two. He almost fell twice because the parts where the tree wasn’t were invisible, and sometimes held weight while other times, they didn’t. But he made it, and settled himself safely behind Not-Bucky, wiping his nose as it started to bleed again. 

“Oh,” he said, looking out at the shimmering field past the edge of the hologram: there was a tank there, a Cold War-era Soviet tank, slowly adusting its main gun to bring to bear on-- well, on them. “Should we worry?”

“Of course,” Not-Bucky said, “but I doubt he’ll break through on the first shot. Look, Belova, I’m trying to--”

“I see what you’re doing,” Yelena said, and Steve gritted his teeth; a little explanation would’ve been nice, though it would’ve been unlikely to be enough for him. He couldn’t see the holograms entirely; he had enough trouble in the real world, but here the combination of their unreality and his colorblindness and astigmatism meant he honestly had no chance of even focusing properly on them, let alone puzzling them out. 

The tank fired, and there was enough noise and light that everything else whited out to nothing for a solid ten seconds and Steve was pretty sure he was dead. “That was unpleasant,” Not-Bucky said after a moment, dim and far-off. “And I still don’t have what I need.”

“What do you need?” Steve asked. 

Not-Bucky’s hands were gentle, setting him back upright on the tree branch. “I need to get Zola out of Natasha’s body,” he said. “Maybe in here I can just go into someone else’s, but in the real world, I need my own body back. I need to make it so JARVIS can find Zola without using this virtual reality thing. JARVIS has to be able to learn to detect Zola no matter where he is, so we can instantly find him in any person or on any device. Now that I know he can upload himself to people-- and that people were given implants that could support him, and others-- we need to know how to fight that. What happened to Bucky, all those days where he couldn’t tell anyone what was wrong-- that can’t happen again, and I’m not only saying that because it happened to me for a couple of hours too.”

“That’s important,” Steve agreed dazedly, blinking into Not-Bucky’s face. His expression-- now Steve could see it, could see that Natasha was animating this face. “That’s-- get to it, I’m fine.”

Not-Bucky patted his cheek. “I can’t get back to it until I can see properly again.”

Steve shoved himself up. “How frequently can they fire that cannon? That’ll be a problem.”

“I’ll blink next time,” Not-Bucky said. 

“No, we gotta do something about that,” Steve said. 

Yelena climbed down next to him— oh, he’d fallen partway down the tree. That explained some of his disorientation. “I will go take care of it,” she said, pulling out her gun and checking the chambers. It was a revolver. Six bullets. She spun the chamber closed and set it down on the branch beside herself.

“No,” Steve said, “you actually know what Not-Bucky’s doing, you have a chance of helping him.” He shook his head, trying to get the ringing in his ears to dissipate. Well, as much as it ever did. 

“Did you just call me Not-Bucky,” Not-Bucky asked, amused. 

“Maybe,” Steve said. “Well, I mean, you’re not, right?”

The tank fired again, and they all managed to close their eyes this time. Steve shoved his left hand into his good ear and covered his face for good measure. 

“He’s fucking up my holograms,” Not-Bucky said glumly. 

“We will both go and take care of it,” Yelena said. 

“Actually,” Not-Bucky said. He tapped at the air, which Steve could only assume held holograms he couldn’t see. “What I need is to find my virtual body in here, and for one of you to interact with it so I can see how much is Zola and how much of me is still in there.”

“I could lure her back here,” Yelena said. 

“I thought I killed her,” Steve mused. “Earlier. Did that not count?”

Not-Bucky turned and stared at him. “Wait,” he said, and snapped his fingers. “You did! You did, and if we go through those logs—“ He turned back to the holograms, indecisive. “I can’t access them from here! Shit, shit.”

“Can JARVIS?” Steve asked.

“Not from here,” Not-Bucky said. “He’s limited, he can’t access the outside world any more than we can— it’s a safety measure, in case Zola could take him over.”

“We’ve got no way of communicating to them what we need,” Yelena said. She was standing very close to Steve now, leaning over slightly, and her emergency extraction device had slipped out of the front of her blouse and was hanging next to him. 

“Yes we have,” Steve said, and reached up to grab it. 

Just as his fingers closed on it, the tank fired again, and they all flinched and closed their eyes. When Steve opened his eyes again, his hand was empty and Yelena was gone. 

“What the fuck,” he said. 

Not-Bucky opened his eyes, next to him— the concussion this time had thrown him down, and it was only because Steve was already sitting that it hadn’t knocked him over. “What happened,” he said. 

Steve looked over the edge, to make sure Yelena hadn’t fallen. “Well,” he said. “Shit.”

“Where is— did you activate the extractor?” Not-Bucky demanded. 

“I didn’t mean to!” Steve said, stomach twisting up in horror. “My hand was on it, though.”

Not-Bucky shoved to his feet, and clambered back to the holograms. Steve looked around a little more. “It’s all right,” Not-Bucky said. “If she tells them to give JARVIS the logs, we’ll be fine.”

“I didn’t mean to do that,” Steve said earnestly. “I know you think I’ll screw up a mission by being stubborn but I really— I was going to volunteer to go.” 

Not-Bucky nodded absently. “It’s okay. She’ll know what to do.” He bit his lip and poked at something. “Shut your eyes a sec, and plug your ears.”

There was an almighty crash as Steve obeyed, and a massive change in air pressure, and when he opened his eyes he wasn’t sure where they were but there wasn’t a tree. “What,” he said feebly.

“I redrew the grid,” Not-Bucky said. “Dropped us a level. It’ll buy us a little time. At least it’ll save us the annoyance of that particular tank.” 

Steve clambered up next to Not-Bucky. His stomach was still all twisted up, and it had made his breathing go tight, and maybe this was about to become an asthma attack, and it struck him not for the first time how unfair it had always been when his own body had tried to remove him from fights rather than letting others do it.

It was a mixed blessing that Not-Bucky, not being Bucky, wouldn’t pick up on the quieter signs of it, so Steve focused on breathing as effectively as he could and not antagonizing any of his physical symptoms any further. There was an art to it, and he’d retained most of the knack. “Say,” he said, squinting at the holographic display and seeing where there were bits that should’ve been in contrasting colors that were just blended together for him, “if my various physical defects are excised from my file, how’d the machine know things like which ear to make me deaf in?”

Not-Bucky laughed. “The machine doesn’t determine that,” he said. “Your mind does. It’s like, the one thing the Matrix got right. You look like you think you look.”

“Wait,” Steve said, sucking in a deeper breath against the painful vise-grip in his chest, “does that mean it really _is_ all in my head?”

“All of this is just in your head,” Not-Bucky said. “Collectively, I guess, in our heads. That doesn’t mean it can’t kill you, Rogers. Doesn’t mean you won’t suffocate your stubborn ass if you don’t take the fucking inhaler in your pocket.”

Ah. Steve dug it out and took a hit. “We didn’t have these when I actually had these problems,” he said, slightly embarrassed. Wasn’t this whole thing just a fantastic carnival of him failing to handle things well? 

 “Aha!” Not-Bucky said, so very Natasha in that moment that Steve was almost surprised to see dark hair out of the corner of his eye. “Yelena sent the logs! She must not even have explained it to the others.”

“Good,” Steve said, putting the inhaler away and coughing tightly. As he bent to drag in a breath, he saw that Yelena’s pistol had landed on the ground next to them, so he picked it up and put it into the holster that had been left empty ever since his initial capture. 

“Ha,” Not-Bucky said, triumphant and intense, and he was so fascinatingly not Bucky it was hard to look away. He glanced over at Steve, his body language all Natasha. “You know, I’m really, really good?”

“I know,” Steve said. 

“It’s really weird,” he said, looking back at the holograms, “but I -- I mean, I’ve been disguised as a lot of different kinds of people in my life, but I’ve never-- I’ve never been a man, not a big one like this, and it’s really distracting.”

Steve laughed at the unexpectedness of it, watching Not-Bucky watch him in his peripheral vision as code scrolled by. “Having been both a little guy and a big guy, I can tell you, it’s incredibly distracting.”

“I feel weirdly sexy,” Not-Bucky said. “It’s-- I didn’t think I would care, but-- it’s very inconvenient that I have an important job to do and have to save my own life, because I really just want to touch myself all over and make out with somebody.” He laughed, and endearingly enough, seemed a little embarrassed. 

“Wish I could oblige you,” Steve said. “But I think now’s not the time. And I mean it, Bucky would be really really mad at us.”

“He’s not the jealous type,” Not-Bucky said, frowning in concentration and staring distantly at a window Steve couldn’t even see. 

“That’s not it, though,” Steve said. “It’s his body, don’t you think enough has been done to or by or with his body without his consent?”

“Fair point,” Not-Bucky said. “I just, I’ve always wondered what it would be like, you know?”

“I know what you mean,” Steve said, watching Natasha’s deft gestures animate Bucky’s big hands. “I’d always wondered what it would be like to-- to be the same size as somebody.” He blushed. 

“Did you never--” Not-Bucky glanced at him, then looked back at the hologram. “I feel like a lot of women would be the same size as this current body of yours.”

“I never was with one,” Steve said. “And in the super body, pretty much everyone’s little to me.”

“You never--” Not-Bucky looked over at him again. “Just women, or anyone?”

“It depends on your definition,” Steve said, “but when I was little like this, I basically never made time with anybody except Bucky, a little bit.” He gestured at the holograms. “Don’t get distracted, we don’t got time.”

Not-Bucky let out a slow breath. “Wow,” he said. “Well. OK, here’s the comparison, of when you stabbed Zola-in-my-body. I think that’s enough comparison for JARVIS. Isn’t it?” 

Something blinked, Steve could see it illuminating Not-Bucky’s face. Not-Bucky made a wrinkled-nose Natasha face. “Fucking damn it,” he said. So, no.

“What if we managed to get the extractor onto Zola-Tasha?” Steve asked, holding his carefully by the chain. 

“That would take some doing,” Not-Bucky said. “And I think we could achieve the same result by extracting me. Maybe. Except then who would be left to collate the logs?”

“I can’t even see the damn screen,” Steve said. “I can’t do it. So I have to get this thing onto Zola.”

“What if you grab onto Zola and hit the button?” Not-Bucky asked. 

“I think it would’ve taken me when I hit Yelena’s button, if it worked that way,” Steve said. 

“I bet I can reprogram it,” Not-Bucky said. “So… who will bell the cat?”

“I always hated that story,” Steve said, but he checked Yelena’s revolver anyway. 

 

 

“All of it,” Wells was saying. “That’s all of it. I’ve held nothing back. I’m not hedging bets. I want Zola destroyed, he’s a reprehensible piece of shit.”

One of the monitors beeped, and they all turned to look at the three people lying on gurneys. “Someone used an extractor,” Tony said. 

Bucky’s gaze went to Natasha— his first thought, when Tony had explained the extractors, was that they should find Natasha and put it on her, but now he didn’t know how that would work, if her body was occupied by someone else— but it was Yelena who gasped deeply, twitched, and then sat up, shaking her head and yanking purposefully at her IVs and glued-on sensors. She was muttering to herself in Russian.

“What?” Lakeisha asked, appearing next to Bucky.

“She’s just swearing,” Bucky said, which was the truth. “What happened?” he asked her, in Russian. 

“Cock-fucking Steve son of a dogfuck whore Rogers,” she answered, sliding off the gurney— she staggered a little, but caught her balance and made her purposeful way over to the terminal, bodily shoving Tony aside. Tony stood back, baffled. 

“Okay,” Bucky said slowly. “What did Steve do?”

“Shut up,” she said, and called up a terminal window, rubbing her face and blinking with the annoyed air of someone whose eyes aren’t focusing correctly who has shit to do. She tilted her head back, closed one eye, and stabbed her finger viciously at the hologram. 

“What are you doing?” Tony asked. 

“Shut up,” she said, “I’m concentrating,” but she said it in Russian, and it was sort of good to know that Tony didn’t speak Russian. 

“She says to shut up, she’s concentrating,” Bucky translated. 

“What’d she tell you?” Tony asked, hands on hips, more baffled than annoyed. 

“Same thing,” he said. 

“Whoreson pus-fucking _bitch_ of a _dog_ ,” Yelena said, heart-wrenchingly sincere. 

Everyone looked at Bucky. “She’s just swearing!” he said. “If I knew what she was swearing about I would tell you! Let her work!”

Yelena pounded a fist on the edge of the counter, yelled “Dirt-sucking cum-eating donkey-taint-licking illegitimate-born whores,” and stabbed viciously at the hologram. 

“I’m not translating that,” Bucky said. “Stop looking at me. I don’t know some of those words. I think she made them up.”

“You’re sending information to JARVIS inside the virtual reality,” Tony said, finally being useful. 

“ _Da_ ,” Yelena said, sounding almost sulky. She scrubbed her wrist across her face and staggered back a little, then slumped against the counter. “Send me back in.”

“She says send me back in,” Bucky translated. 

“Now you can translate,” Tony said. 

“Now it’s not just all swear words,” Bucky corrected. 

“I’ll send you back in when you can speak English again,” Tony said. 

Yelena gave him a resentful look, and the doctor gently pushed Tony out of the way to come up next to her and take her by the arm. “If you’ve finished what you had to do,” Asiyah said, “you should probably sit down, you still have a great deal of sedative in your system and it’s going to make it hard for you to walk and speak for a little bit, yet.”

“Okay,” Yelena said, sullen, and let herself be steered to a chair. Tony stepped in and peered at the terminal she’d been using. 

“She sent JARVIS a copy of the logs from just before the last glitch,” Tony said. 

“When Steve killed Natasha,” Yelena said, still in Russian, and slurred heavily.

“When Steve killed Natasha,” Bucky translated slowly. “Oh! When Steve fought and then stabbed Natasha’s avatar, which Zola was using, and it sent the whole scenario into a glitch. Belova,” and he switched back to Russian even though she seemed to be understanding English just fine, “is Natasha working with you in there, but wearing my body?”

Yelena blinked slowly, rubbed her face, and took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said, still in Russian, “or at least, Steve believes it’s her. I’m not convinced.”

“It’s her,” Bucky said. “We can see it from out here, we can see that it’s not a machine, it’s a person using— me as an avatar. It has to be Romanoff.”

“What’s going on,” Tony asked. 

“Hang on a second,” Bucky said, annoyed. 

“But what if it isn’t,” Yelena said, and he could see how upset she was, and that was an important data point because it indicated she genuinely was worried for Natasha and wasn’t just upset at having been sent out here. 

“It is,” he said. “We’re certain, Belova. It is her. She can use the thing to communicate with JARVIS, can’t she?”

“Yes,” Yelena said. “Which is part of why I was so alarmed.”

“Romanoff is an excellent hacker,” Bucky said. “It’s not surprising at all. I know she’s worked extensively with JARVIS before. If anyone can do this, she can, even if she’s stuck in my body.” 

“What’s going _onnn_ ,” Tony said, more intensely frustrated. 

“Don’t you have, like, a translation program or something,” Lakeisha asked. 

“I do,” Tony said, “but it needs JARVIS to run, and he’s kind of occupied in a virtual reality with a demented AI copy of an evil Nazi genius, so—“ 

“So she wanted me to get the logs of when Zola in her body got stabbed by Rogers,” Yelena said, and her English was heavily accented but on its way toward comprehensibility, “so she could compare and see the point where Zola separated off from her, so JARVIS could learn to recognize the difference.”

“Why’d they send you?” Tony asked. 

“By accident,” Yelena snarled. But she subsided, and rubbed her face. “It was probably best, though, Steve is no good in there but he would have had to explain out here because you all are so dense, and you know every minute out here is twenty in there and we were under attack.”

A sudden, vivid memory of her looking like this, younger and tired and frightened and discouraged, shot through Bucky, and he knew it was real, knew it was from the time Natasha remembered too, and he sat down unsteadily in the chair next to her and stared at her, remembering. There had been six of them, adolescent girls, nearly grown, and he’d balked at hurting them. He’d only escaped a stern correction because his handler had been an idiot and assumed he was objecting because it was beneath him to be pitted against teenage girls, not because it upset him to think of hurting them.

“You’re handling this better than the last time we worked together,” he said, remembering her— wiry, tall for her age, ambitious and driven and far, far too convinced that wanting something was an important component in getting it. He’d trapped her when she’d overestimated her own speed, and had managed the ‘killing’ strike when she’d thought she could muscle through his attack, and he’d given the Black Widow trainers the very good advice that pitting little girls against each other gave them an exaggerated idea of their own strength. Yelena had been the biggest and strongest of the girls in the program, but at five-six and 110 pounds, that didn’t mean much against a six-foot half-cyborg. 

She’d had no sense of humor back then, but now she gave him a keenly amused look. “You don’t remember the last time we worked together,” she said. 

“I remember when you were fifteen,” he said. 

“You were a softie,” she said, laughing. 

“You were adorable,” he said. “I wanted to ruffle your hair, not nearly-break your ribs.”

“That’s not the last time we worked together, though,” Yelena said. 

“She’s not swearing now,” Tony said, “I can tell that much.”

“There’s nothing else to translate,” Bucky said, exasperated. “I already told you what you need to know. We’re having a personal conversation you don’t have to be in.”

“We’re talking about old times in Mother Russia,” Yelena said, her English fluent now. “And how great your butt looks in those jeans.”

Bucky snorted and almost fell off the chair. “Of course my butt looks great in these jeans,” Tony said, “you don’t think I do my own shopping, do you? I have people for that.”

“Do they buy you a new butt every so often?” Yelena asked. 

“No,” Tony said, “I grew that myself, I do a lot of squats. So Natasha is trying to teach JARVIS to recognize Zola’s signature anywhere, right? Because I had been working on that, and I’m going to send her what I have, if you’d be so kind as to show me where exactly she can receive it.”

Yelena shoved herself to her feet, but then leaned over and ruffled Bucky’s hair. “Now who’s adorable,” she said, and went over to the holographic interface to show Tony what she knew.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover Art - A Face Built For Gettin' Punched](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4696607) by [Lori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lori/pseuds/Lori)




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